IU grant to help doctors screen chemo patients

Lung cancer patients who receive chemotherapy undergo treatment in hopes it will make them better. But in reality, some die from the very treatment they hope will cure them. \nJake Chen, an IU School of Informatics researcher and co-founder of Predictive Physiology and Medicine, will join other IU faculty in hopes of determining which patients are sensitive to chemotherapy treatment in order to directly save their lives.\nAfter receiving a $174,000 grant from the IU Melvin and Bren Simon Cancer Center-based Lung Cancer Working Group early this month, Chen, a bioinformatics researcher and professor at IU-Purdue University Indianapolis, will join IU scientists and professors of medicine Dr. Larry Einhorn and Nasser Hanna on a project expected to last two years, Chen said.\nChen and Steve Valentine, both co-founders of Predictive Physiology and Medicine, located in Bloomington, are principal investigators for the project, which will use Informatics techniques to analyze the protein profiles in the cells of lung cancer patients, Chen said. \n"These profiles are presumed to be different from patient to patient, and they embed signals that we can use to differentiate patients who are sensitive from chemo from those who are not," Chen said.\nLung cancer patients in the late stage of the disease have a high death rate as about half of the cases are fatal, he said, many from complications involving the chemotherapy.\nCancer clinicians and researchers at the IU Cancer Center who will serve as directors of the project include Einhorn and Hanna, according to an IU School of Medicine press release. \nEinhorn is noted in the release for developing a chemotherapy regimen for testicular cancer patients that now shows a 95 percent cure rate. \nValentine said he hopes the project will begin in December. Chen added that it will begin after the hiring of post-doctoral researchers after a nationwide search to fill the positions.\nTheir goal is to be able to tell which patients will reject the chemotherapy, so they can be given an alternative treatment plan, Chen said.\n"It is quite innovative in the sense that we haven't seen any other groups in the nation actually propose something like it," he said. \nValentine said the technology they'll be using is faster and more efficient, which he believes puts their project ahead of other researchers.\n"The overall goal is to find markers that would indicate people who would reject the therapy or who would be doing well on the therapy," Valentine said.\nChen also hopes the techniques will be applicable to other types of disease and cancer. \n"The lung cancer group is the group we're working with right now, and we're hoping this will generate some exciting preliminary results," he said. "And once we have the preliminary results we can go even deeper to find out a cure for other (kinds of) cancer"