Cancer research breakthrough makes future treatment possible, says chief investigator

Researchers at Catalonia’s Vall d’Hebron Institute of Oncology (VHIO) have discovered a mechanism to block tumor cells responsible for the recurrence of several types of cancer. 

The finding could make the difficult challenge of fighting cancer easier—especially against tumor cells that resist current treatments and can cause the disease to reappear years later. Working for one of the main oncology research centers in Europe, scientists at the VHIO started to study these cells nearly a decade ago. It might take another 5 years or more to figure out a treatment that could effectively help treat cancer in humans. To find out more, we speak with Héctor G. Palmer, the principal investigator of the team. According to him, scientific needs more government research.

What was the problem that you and your team were trying to solve? 

We have been working for the past ten years on what is known as dormant tumor cells. These cells are relevant in cancer for two main reasons. One is they are resistant to most of the treatments there are currently available, so you have to think that drugs are designed to kill cells that proliferate and multiply and those that are latent or dormant escape these treatments completely. This is quite a challenge for oncologists because these cells then hide as a residual disease and are responsible for future relapses. So months, years or even decades after, patients relapse and these are the cells responsible of the regrowth. 

What were your findings, and why are they important in the fight against dormant tumor cells? 

The issue was that by profiling and investigating the molecular characteristics of these cells we were able to identify a factor that is known as TET 2, and it's an epygenetic enzyme that is not only responsible of driving these cells to dormancy and making them resistant to treatment, but also doing that orchestrating a process that give these cells their malignancy, the full potential to regrow the tumor. The most striking result, which is the main focus of our publication, is that if you eliminate TET 2, these dormant tumor cells die. That made us quite excited because it was a potential drug target.  So we started two years ago a drug development program, focusing on inhibiting with small drugs this TET 2. This is the initial step for making possible a future drug to eliminate dormant tumor cells in cancer patients. 

How was your project funded? 

We are a laboratory that was funded ten years ago, I'd just come back from UK at the time that the huge economic crisis started, so it's been quite hard to build projects like this. We've been working on dormant tumor cells for 10 years, so it was strategic to have the support of the Spanish Association Against Cancer, the foundation dedicated to raise money from regular citizens and then invest it in particular projects of cancer research. Without support like this, this project would simply disappear, dissolve, like many others in (the last) ten years. I’ve been facing my colleagues leaving back to other countries, or simply being unable to build a team or a project. so we were lucky in this sense because we got the support of the civil population. This also explains that we're living in a desert of institutional investment. 

With new governments in Catalonia and Spain, what should they do to help scientific research?  

You have to know a general budget on science that is getting closer to simply the European coutnries that we have nearby. We’re so far from these percentages of the whole national budget, both from the Catalant or the Spanish government. You need to invest more in research and scientific projects.