The Scientist November 2018

(singke) #1

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.
Free download pdf