DETROIT, Feb. 5 /PRNewswire/ -- A Henry Ford Hospital researcher has been awarded a $9 million grant by the National Institutes of Health to study the effectiveness of gene therapy as a treatment for prostate cancer.
The treatment, developed over the last few years by Svend Freytag, Ph.D., division head of Radiation Oncology at Henry Ford, is a new approach that uses gene therapy to enhance the effectiveness of radiation therapy.
“I believe this research will eventually yield high cure rates for prostate cancer and possibly other forms of cancer as well,” says Dr. Freytag.
Later this year a clinical trial will begin involving 130 patients. In one group, 65 patients will be treated with gene and radiation therapy; the other 65 patients will be treated with only radiation therapy.
This is encouraging news for men who suffer from this disease. According to the American Cancer Society, nearly 200,000 men in the United States will be newly diagnosed with prostate cancer and 40,000 men will die from it in 2004. It is the second-leading cause of cancer death in men, after lung cancer.
The two methods that are currently used to treat prostate cancer are radiation therapy and surgery. Radiation therapy has proven to be only partially effective and surgery must be done delicately due to the intricate network of blood vessels in the area surrounding the prostate.
In the new approach, a replication-competent virus (the one associated with the common cold) developed by Freytag and his team is used to carry therapeutic genes to cancer cells. The virus attacks the cancerous cells, but leaves normal ones undamaged. When combined with the gene therapy, the effect is enhanced, rendering the malignant cells sensitive to radiation therapy.
In earlier trials at Henry Ford, which were intended to test the safety of the approach, the initial results were encouraging and are the main reason funding was awarded for additional research.
A previous study, published last year in the November edition of Cancer Research, showed that patients experienced no significant side effects when treated with gene therapy and radiation therapy. It also found that the treatment lowered patients’ prostate-specific antigen (PSA) and eliminated the cancer in many of them.
PSA is a protein produced by the prostate. By measuring its level, doctors can monitor prostate cancer growth as well as the effectiveness of standard and investigational treatments.
All 15 patients enrolled in the study experienced significant declines in their PSA -- from an average PSA score of 12 to below one -- and 10 patients were cancer-free after one year. The patients had an aggressive form of prostate cancer that, if treated with standard radiation therapy alone, would likely recur and possibly spread.
“The goal is to develop better, newer approaches to conventional forms of treatment and test them in clinical trials,” says Dr. Freytag.
Henry Ford Hospital
CONTACT: Synthia Bryant (TV/Radio), or David Olejarz (Print), both ofHenry Ford Hospital, +1-313-876-2882
Web site: http://henryfordhealth.org/
