Precision attack on cancer
Most cancer patients receive one or more of the frontline chemotherapy drugs that have been discovered over the past 50 years. These drugs are often effective but have major drawbacks, including severe side effects and the possibility that tumors will become resistant to them.Michael Hemann, the Eisen and Chang Career Development Associate Professor of Biology at MIT, is trying to figure out how tumors develop that resistance, in hopes of developing new drugs that could overcome it. “The challenge is to really understand the biology of how a tumor cell adapts to a particular therapy,” says Hemann, who is a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. Hemann’s studies of cancer genetics could also help improve deployment of existing drugs. Many genetic studies have shown that certain drugs work best on tumors with a particular combination of mutations. This kind of information is necessary to develop personalized treatments,...