While one trend in cancer treatment involves ever-more personalized medicine, some researchers are trying to find out how to treat cancer more universally.
These include molecular biologist Ronald Parchem, who was recruited in 2015 to Baylor College of Medicine from the University of California, San Francisco, where he was a postdoctoral fellow. He joined the Department of Neuroscience, Center for Stem Cells & Regenerative Medicine, and the Dan L. Duncan Cancer Center.
Parchem studies the difficult-to-kill cancer cells that remain behind after treatment, which can seed recurrence and metastasis. These cells resemble stem cells, or cells that can differentiate into different types of cells. One of these stem cells could move to a different organ and cause new aggressive tumors to form there.
As a postdoctoral fellow, Parchem found a crucial regulatory molecule that controls early embryonic brain development. This regulatory molecule is silenced after it plays its role in a developing embryo, but it is reactivated in some cancer cells.
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While one trend in cancer treatment involves ever-more personalized medicine, some researchers are trying to find out how to treat cancer more universally.
These include molecular biologist Ronald Parchem, who was recruited in 2015 to Baylor College of Medicine from the University of California, San Francisco, where he was a postdoctoral fellow. He joined the Department of Neuroscience, Center for Stem Cells & Regenerative Medicine, and the Dan L. Duncan Cancer Center.
Parchem studies the difficult-to-kill cancer cells that remain behind after treatment, which can seed recurrence and metastasis. These cells resemble stem cells, or cells that can differentiate into different types of cells. One of these stem cells could move to a different organ and cause new aggressive tumors to form there.
As a postdoctoral fellow, Parchem found a crucial regulatory molecule that controls early embryonic brain development. This regulatory molecule is silenced after it plays its role in a developing embryo, but it is reactivated in some cancer cells.
He wondered, if cancer stem cells resemble these early developmental cells, then maybe this gene would be expressed in different tumor types, even though it’s not in normal mature cells. He was excited to find that this gene is active in diverse tumors: glioma, pancreatic, liver, germ-cell. “The crucial thing is that this gene is expressed only in cancer and not in adult tissues,” he says, “and we’ve found it in multiple types of tumors.”
Although treatments targeting these tumor cells don’t exist yet, Parchem is isolating the cells and studying them to come up with a therapy that would target only the tumor stem cells. He envisions it as a drug or immune therapy, used in conjunction with conventional treatment, that a patient could take for a long time—because it would not harm any cells other than cancer stem cells—to ensure that the cancer never returns.
He hopes to leverage the strength of the Dan L. Duncan Cancer Center in immune therapy to develop programmed T-cells that would target something on the surface of the cancer stem cells and destroy them. Since the CAR T-cell therapy program at Baylor is very robust and already up and running, he thinks it would take less time to get a new therapy approved.
“My idea would be that we would find something common to multiple types of cancers that many patients could take,” he says.
Parchem finds the opportunities for new discoveries at the Texas Medical Center limitless because of the size and quality of the clinical center. He says CPRIT funding has allowed him to take on risky projects and follow up on a novel concept. “I would not have been allowed to study this project anywhere else,” he says, “or I would have had to study something that’s lower risk. But we’ve had a very exciting result in that we see the same thing across many different tumor types, which means our hard work has paid off.”
CPRIT’s $2 million investment has leveraged nearly $6 million in additional funding for Parchem’s research from private foundations and the National Institutes of Health.
Parchem was an undergraduate at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he received a B.S. and M.S. in biology. He completed his Ph.D. in molecular cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and joined UCSF as a postdoctoral fellow in 2009.
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