This researcher is flipping the switch on lung cancer.

It’s great to be back! One of my favorite things each week is sharing incredible cancer research funded by the V Foundation . By relaying research in an approachable way - my goal is to spread optimism about the future of cancer research and its translational to improved, increased - and more impactful, cancer therapies. Every (single!) day I read something that excites me - an idea fueled by these incredible advances. If I can share a fraction of that excitement, we all win. The hard part is choosing just one story each week.

This week’s Cool Cancer Find comes from the V Foundation 's grantee Dr. Xiuning Le MD Anderson Cancer Center whose research is akin to uncovering hidden patterns in a puzzle – Dr. Le’s lab focuses on understanding a specific type of lung cancer: non-small cell lung cancer or NSCLC.

NSCLC is a formidable foe: it is the most common type of lung cancer in the U.S., accounting for about 85% of cases, with significant impacts each year, including over 238,000 new diagnoses, more than 127,000 deaths, and substantial financial and emotional burdens for patients and families. The biggest challenge in treating NSCLC is its often late-stage diagnosis, which limits curative treatment options and contributes to poor survival rates.

This study from Dr. Le's lab provides new ideas and new hope for different treatment options: in NSCLC there is a gene called?ERBB2 that has recently been identified as an important factor driving development and growth of NSCLC. A ‘cool’ part of this research is that this gene is "actionable" meaning that the mutation found in ERBB2 can be specifically targeted for treatment.

The challenging news is that ERBB2 is like a switch that, when turned on by a mutation, can cause lung cancer to grow. The good news is that Dr. Le and colleagues have now found ways to block this switch with drugs, providing new treatment options for patients.

What does the path look like for developing these drugs? Well, imagine lung cancer as a tree, with different branches representing different types of genetic changes that make the cancer grow. One of these branches is ERBB2, the gene that can act like a broken switch, causing cells to multiply uncontrollably.?

Dr. Le and team studied ERBB2 changes in a large group of lung cancer patients from both China and the United States to see how common these changes are and what other problems tend to show up alongside them.?

They found that about 5% of lung cancer patients had changes in ERBB2, and within that group, certain changes appeared more often, like a specific pattern that acts as the "master key" to turning on the broken switch. Interestingly, these changes were more common in people who had never smoked, especially women.?

The key takeaway from the study is that different changes in this broken switch may respond differently to treatment. The team found that some existing treatments don’t work very well for certain ERBB2 changes, but newer treatments that target this broken switch more directly are showing promise. Basically - the team is developing a better tool to fix the switch that might otherwise keep the cancer growing.

For cancer patients, this research helps doctors understand which treatments might work best based on the exact nature of the genetic changes in their cancer. This study offers hope that targeting the specific "broken switches" in cancer could lead to better, more personalized treatment options. Well done Dr. Le! Find the Le lab at https://faculty.mdanderson.org/profiles/xiuning_le.html and the paper at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41698-024-00720-9

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