The Scientist November 2018

16 THE SCIENTIST | the-scientist.com

Notebook

NEWS AND ANALYSIS

MOUNT SINAI HEALTH SYSTEM

NOVEMBER 2018

Omics-ing

Cancer

A

t first, Stuart Harshbarger thought

he’d injured his back lifting fur-

niture and boxes. When the pain

started, in 2008, “we’d just moved from

Detroit to New York,” he explains. But the

pain was excruciating, so the then 45-year-

old international management consultant

saw a doctor, who tested him for multiple

myeloma, a blood cancer that often causes

back pain. He got the results by phone while

on a business trip in Germany, and was

“scared to death,” he remembers.

In the decade since, Harshbarger’s

odyssey has been typical of that of many

multiple myeloma patients—though he’s

made it past the median survival time for

the disease, six years. He’s been through

a series of standard treatments, most of

which worked for some time until his

cancer developed resistance, prompting

his doctors to move him to another ther-

apy. He was able to keep working for most

of his time with the disease, but had to go

out on disability beginning in mid-2016.

By 2017, “I was just completely out of

options,” he recalls. At 55 years old, with

a wife, one kid in high school and another

in college, he was determined to hang on

for as long as possible. “Every month that I

can stay alive, I can improve and enhance

the lives of my [family], who need my help

right now,” he says. “So we’re just strug-

gling for every month we can get, to keep

the party going.”

That year, Harshbarger entered

an immunotherapy trial of autolo-

gous CAR T cells engineered to tar-

get BCMA, a protein on the surface of

multiple myeloma cells. The treatment

didn’t seem to affect his cancer, and by

this time, he was nearly bedridden. What

Harshbarger didn’t yet know was that

his doctors at Mount Sinai Hospital in

New York had launched a small clinical

trial—not of a new treatment per se, but

of a different way of finding treatment

options for patients like him.

MAKING OLD NEW AGAIN: Mount Sinai

Hospital researchers Samir Parekh and Deepak

Perumal use DNA and RNA sequencing to help

find new combinations of existing treatments

for cancer patients.