October 26, 2011
A new study from the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy’s Institute for Pharmacogenomics and Individualized Therapy and UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center evaluated twenty-nine commonly used cancer chemotherapy drugs in the laboratory and found that how patients’ genes influence their response to chemotherapy varies widely between different drugs and different classes of drugs.
The study was published online in the October issue of the journal Pharmacogenomics.
“We know that chemotherapy works to kill cancer cells, but the problem is that we don’t know exactly why it works better for some patients than for others,” said project researcher Kristy Richards, MD, PhD, an assistant professor in the UNC School of Medicine and a member of UNC Lineberger.
The research team tested the inheritance of chemotherapy-drug response by using cancer cells derived from fourteen extended families. Response varied a great deal among the twenty-nine tested drugs. Genetics influenced as little as 15 percent of the response to some drugs and as much as 60 percent for others.
The team also found genetic markers that were unique to drugs from the same chemical family.
“Our results can help us and other scientists zoom in on the region of the genome that holds clues to why chemotherapy — or certain drug classes of chemotherapy — doesn’t work as well for some people,” said Howard McLeod, PharmD, the project’s principal investigator, Eshelman distinguished professor in the Eshelman School of Pharmacy, and a member of UNC Lineberger.
Other authors on the paper include IPIT members Eric Peters, PhD; Alison Motsinger-Reif, PhD; Tammy Havener; Lorraine Everitt; Venita Watson; Michael Wagner, PhD; as well as Nicholas Hardison from the UNC Bioinformatics Research Center and Mike Province from Washington University in St. Louis.
The project was supported by the NIH Pharmacogenetics Research Network, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the University Cancer Research Fund and Triad Golfers Against Cancer.
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