Utah positioned to become leader in cancer therapeutics industry

Utah positioned to become leader in cancer therapeutics industry

By Elenor Heyborne, KSL.com Contributor

July 23rd, 2014 @ 11:45am

Cancer therapeutics and drug discovery are vital areas of research and are constantly evolving as we seek to find new methods to cure the disease and develop new treatment options. With its world-class research institutions and a history of genetic discovery, Utah is positioned to become a leader in the cancer therapeutics industry.

Two Utah companies, Mesagen and TheraTarget, are ahead of the curve in Utah when it comes to the advancement of cancer therapeutics.

Mesagen is a Salt Lake City-based biological company working on cancer stem cell therapeutics, based in the Utah Science Technology and Research Initiative (USTAR) supported by BioInnovations Gateway. The company has acquired a proteomic database from Myriad Pharmaceuticals which contains 35,000 different protein-protein interactions representing over 5,500 different human proteins. The database is used to discover protein ligands that bind to therapeutic targets for cancer stem cell therapy.

Scott Morham, CEO and CSO of Mesagen, said we get cancer every day, 24 hours a day and seven days a week. Our immune systems mostly wipe the cancer out, but every now and again an early progenitor cell or multipotent cell becomes transformed, thus forming a cancer stem cell that can differentiate into the various types of tissues needed to form a tumor and promote metastasis.

Think of a tumor more like an organ in the body, said Morham. It needs a variety of different cell types to be able to maintain its structure. The tumor needs certain types of cells to create growth factors; it needs endothelial cells to form arteries; it needs mesenchymal cells to promote motility. A wide variety of cells are necessary for malignant tumor formation.

The only things that can do that are cancer stem cells, according to Morham. Even though current therapies can shrink the tumor itself, and the faster growing differentiated tissue is killed, the cancer stem cells that divide very slowly linger. This means the tumor has shrunk but it will inevitably come back, a common occurrence with almost all therapies. Morham said to actually cure cancer, its essential to get rid of the root cause of carcinogenesis.

Some of what were doing is actually getting at the root cause of carcinogenesis, said Morham. Current therapies can shrink the size of tumors. They affect carcinogenic tumor tissue, but cancer stem cells divide slowly and are usually cloaked from the immune system. One of our major modes of getting at them is to reactivate the immune system to see those carcinogenic cancer stem cells and have them be chewed up by macrophages.

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Utah positioned to become leader in cancer therapeutics industry