CU Cancer Center wins $599,999 Komen grant

Researchers from the University of Colorado Cancer Center (UCCC) have been awarded a $599,999 grant from the Susan G. Komen Foundation for the Cure to investigate whether using a common diabetes drug can stop tumor growth in breast cancer.

“We’re beginning to explore the relationship between pre-diabetes syndrome or type II diabetes, obesity and breast cancer risk,” said Steve Anderson, PhD, professor of Pathology at the University of Colorado Denver School of Medicine (SOM), the study’s primary investigator. “We will be testing the drug to see if it can reverse the risk of breast cancer associated with obesity.”

The grant will be awarded over three years.

Cancer cells are often fueled by glucose, found in blood sugar. The cells use a lot of glucose and burn it quite efficiently to feed their growth and help them invade and spread. People who are obese, diabetic or both tend to have elevated blood glucose levels. That fact may partially explain why post-menopausal women who are obese, pre-diabetic or diabetic have higher incidence of breast cancer.

UCCC researchers Paul MacLean, PhD, and Pepper Schedin, PhD, have shown in unpublished studies that the obese, post-menopausal rats get more breast cancer tumors than their lean counterparts. At the same time, UCCC researcher Ann Thor, MD, has discovered that using a common diabetes drug called metformin—known by the brand name Glucophage—starves breast cancer cells and causes them to die.

“We hope to have data in 18 to 24 months that shows that in rats, metformin stabilizes the blood glucose level and stops the breast cancer tumors from growing,” said Anderson.

The group is also seeking funding to begin a Phase II clinical study in humans. “If funding is found, those clinical trials could begin within the next few years,” Anderson said, noting that metformin may well be a medicine that could be used to prevent breast cancer in the future.

Anderson stressed that this promising, bold new research project is possible only because each scientist is a member of UCCC.

“We each bring these unique strengths and experiences to the project, and unless we had the mechanism of the University of Colorado Cancer Center to work through, we may not have put the team together,” he said. “We are five people from four university departments. The Cancer Center is what brings us together, what provides us with the excellent facilities such as our Metabolomics and Animal Imaging shared services. We each have a key to a different part of the problem.”

The other scientists involved in the project are:

• Paul MacLean, PhD, associate professor of Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism at UC Denver SOM, who is an expert in obesity and nutrition.
  
  
• Pepper Schedin, PhD, associate professor of Medical Oncology at UC Denver SOM, who is an expert in rat models of breast cancer, and who has developed a rat model of obesity.
  
  
• Ann Thor, MD, professor of Pathology at UC Denver SOM, a pathologist with strong work in breast cancer.
  
  
• Natalie Serkova, PhD, associate professor of Anesthesiology at UC Denver SOM and director of the UCCC Animal Imaging and Metabolomics shared core services.