WASHINGTON, DC — Autophagy, the process by which cells that are starved for food resort to chewing up their own damaged proteins and membranes and recycling them into fuel, has emerged as a key pathway that cancer cells use to survive in the face of assault by chemotherapy and radiation. Using drugs to shut down that survival mechanism shows great promise, especially when combined with targeted agents and standard chemotherapies, but until recently, it has been unclear which patients’ cancers would respond to that combination therapy.
A team led by researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania will present findings (Presentation #1679A) during the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2013 showing that colon cancer and lung cancer cell lines which expressed a gene known as helicase-like transcription factor (HLTF) tended to be impervious to the effects of the autophagy inhibition drug hydroxycholoroquine (HCQ). Cells where HLTF is silent, however, appeared to be sensitive to HCQ, which led the team to test HLTF expression in a group of colon cancer patients treated with two chemotherapies (the FOLFOX regimen plus bevacizumab) and HCQ. They found that low expression of HLTF predicted those who would respond to the combination therapy.
Since previous studies have shown that HLTF gene silencing is common in 20 to 40 percent of many epithelial cancers, the Penn team is hopeful their findings could lead to the development of a predictive biomarker to identify patients with other cancers who are most likely to respond to drug therapies involving autophagy inhibitors.
The study will be presented by Ravi Amaravadi, MD, in the Autophagy and Cell Death poster session, Hall A-C, Poster Section 23, at the at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, 801 Mt Vernon Pl NW, Washington, DC 20001, from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. ET on Monday, April 8, 2013.
Penn Medicine is one of the world’s leading academic medical centers, dedicated to the related missions of medical education, biomedical research, excellence in patient care, and community service. The organization consists of the University of Pennsylvania Health System and Penn’s Raymond and Ruth Perelman School of Medicine, founded in 1765 as the nation’s first medical school.
The Perelman School of Medicine is consistently among the nation's top recipients of funding from the National Institutes of Health, with $550 million awarded in the 2022 fiscal year. Home to a proud history of “firsts” in medicine, Penn Medicine teams have pioneered discoveries and innovations that have shaped modern medicine, including recent breakthroughs such as CAR T cell therapy for cancer and the mRNA technology used in COVID-19 vaccines.
The University of Pennsylvania Health System’s patient care facilities stretch from the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania to the New Jersey shore. These include the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, Chester County Hospital, Lancaster General Health, Penn Medicine Princeton Health, and Pennsylvania Hospital—the nation’s first hospital, founded in 1751. Additional facilities and enterprises include Good Shepherd Penn Partners, Penn Medicine at Home, Lancaster Behavioral Health Hospital, and Princeton House Behavioral Health, among others.
Penn Medicine is an $11.1 billion enterprise powered by more than 49,000 talented faculty and staff.