Boosting treatments for metastatic melanoma

Now, University of Cincinnati clinician-scientist Soma Sengupta, MD, PhD, along with lead investigator Daniel Pomeranz Krummel, PhD, says new findings point to a treatment-boosting drug to enhance therapies for metastatic cancer and make them more effective, giving patients a fighting chance at survival.

“Melanoma is a serious skin cancer that evolves from the pigment cells of the skin and eyes,” says Sengupta, associate professor of neurology at UC, UC Health neuro-oncologist and co-director of the UC Gardner Neuroscience Institute’s Brain Tumor Center. “There are millions of people in the U.S. living with this type of cancer, and the incidence is projected to increase.

“Our long-term goal is to add this new class of drugs to a patient’s radiation and immunotherapy treatment,” says Sengupta, who is a corresponding author on the paper and the Harold C. Schott Endowed Chair of Molecular Therapeutics. They are collaborating with investigators from UC who are helping to formulate the lead compound, including Pankaj Desai, PhD, with the James L. Winkle College of Pharmacy, as well as with Mohammad Khan, PhD, of Emory University, who will test this approach via clinical trial once Sengupta has approval from the Food and Drug Administration to test this drug in humans.

Other investigators on this study include Laura Kallay, PhD, Debanjan Bhattacharya, PhD, Dan Ionascu, PhD, and Mario Medvedovic, PhD, all from the University of Cincinnati; Tahseen Nasti, PhD, Milota Kaluzova, PhD, Andre Burnham, PhD, David Lawson, MD, Yichun Cao, Jeffrey Switchenko, PhD, Mohammad Khan, MD, and Andrew Jenkins, PhD, all from Emory University; Johannes Melms, MD, and Benjamin Izar, MD, of Columbia University; Maxwell Xu, Johns Hopkins University; Taukir Ahmed, PhD, Guanguan Li, PhD, and James Cook, PhD, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; and Jeanne Kowalski, PhD, University of Texas.

Funding and disclosures available here. Conflicts of interest for Sengupta, Cook and Pomeranz Krummel include a start-up called AMLAL, which has been developed based on this data to apply for small business technology transfer funding and other funding mechanisms to bring this compound into the clinic setting faster.