MIAMI – An investigation led by Dr. Ashish Shah, director of Clinical Trials and Translational Research at Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, is focused on viruses associated with brain tumors and actually using viral based gene therapy to help make cancer treatments more effective, especially in cases of glioblastoma, an aggressive form of the disease.
“Viruses account for 10 percent of all cancers worldwide and a causative link between glioblastoma and viruses really hasn’t been discovered and our research is trying to tease out is there a virus responsible for glioblastoma formation and is there a virus in general to prevent it from growing and invading the rest of the brain,” Shah said.
One of the keys for Shah and his colleagues is harnessing the power of anti-retroviral compounds as an effective treatment modality.
Shah and fellow researcher Dr. Michael Ivan have found increased survival rates using these compounds in mice models.
And another study out of Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center found that police officers and construction workers who responded on September 11, 2001, to the World Trade Center disaster in New York City and worked in its aftermath had at least twice the risk of developing the precursor for multiple myeloma compared to the general population.
Multiple Myeloma is the second most common blood cancer in adults in the U.S. each year, about 35,000 new cases are diagnosed and, today, more than 150,000 adults are living with multiple myeloma.
There is not yet an established curative therapy for the disease.