Geisel School of Medicine pharmacology and toxicology professor Michael Spinella is being awarded a $250,000 two-year grant by the Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation to support his research, which could lead to a treatment for testicular cancer that is more effective and less toxic than current treatment options. Spinella is among five researchers across the country receiving a 2014 Reach Grant from the foundation, which gives the grants to move childhood cancer research from the lab to the clinic.
Spinella’s work in testicular germ cell tumors suggests that because of a unique feature of testicular cancer, the cancer could be killed with a certain drug class, DNA methylation inhibitors. Lab results show that doses 1,000 times lower than those needed to treat lung or breast cancers will kill testicular cancer cells. Testicular cancer cells resistant to other drugs are responding to the treatment, Spinella said.
Testicular cancer is the most common carcinoma, a category of cancers that also includes breast and lung cancer for men ages 15 to 35. Testicular cancer is “relatively curable,” Spinella said, but it’s often treated with chemotherapy, a nonspecific treatment with a slew of side effects such as infection, hair loss, pain, nausea and fatigue.
With current treatments, a teenage patient may be cured but suffer lifelong side effects like infertility, Spinella said. His findings show, however, that this may not need to be the case.
The new treatment could also cure patients whose cancer is untreatable with other drugs.
“Patients who are resistant to existent therapies for testicular cancer will die of their disease,” he said. “This can be a therapy to treat those patients successfully.”
Dr. Costantine Albany, an oncologist at the Indiana University Health Simon Cancer Center, who is collaborating with Spinella on the research, said Indiana University and the College have had “great collaboration” on the work.
In the coming weeks, Albany will begin a clinical trial to treat teenage men with testicular cancer who have failed all other treatments. The patients will be treated with a DNA methylation inhibitor, in the hopes that the drug will make the cancer susceptible to chemotherapy.
“It hopefully will cure the rest of the people who are not cured,” Albany said. “It will offer them a chance of a cure.”
Spinella has studied testicular cancer for years, and has worked at Geisel since 1999.
Testicular cancer “is a rare disease, but it always sort of fascinated me,” Spinella said. He said he finds it interesting that the cancer is highly aggressive yet many patients can still be cured, as well as the general curability of the disease. The tumors he studies also represent a good model of the cancer stem cell, he said, meaning that knowledge gained from studying these cells may be able to be applied to other cancers similar to testicular cancer.
Spinella’s work was selected for a grant because it received a high score following review by a team of researchers, Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation co-executive director Jay Scott said. He said the foundation hopes the grant will bring Spinella’s research a step closer to a clinical trial.
“The treatments haven’t changed in many, many years,” he said. “Sometimes treatments are very toxic to the kids, so this is looking at something that could be more effective.”
The foundation awards between five and 10 grants annually. Researchers at the Beckman Research Institute of City of Hope, the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, the National Cancer Institute and the University of California at San Francisco also received grants.
Geisel professors Carmen Marsit and Brock Christensen also contributed to the awarded work, Spinella said.
