A University of Calgary research team studying ‘designer viruses’ to fight cancer brought their treatment to clinical trials thanks to a $9.5 milion gift from the Canadian Cancer Society four years ago.
Assistant professor Douglas Mahoney and his team are trying to understand how a patient’s immune system interacts with cancer and how the cancer fights off the patient’s immune system. The goal, he said, is to harness the power of a patient’s immune system to attack and kill the cancer.
Originally an exercise physiologist, Mahoney got into cancer research after going to the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario for post-doctoral training at a lab that was developing drugs for cancer.
“Once I started doing cancer research, it became apparent to me that there was another way that I wanted to think about trying to tackle the cancer problem, and that was with a patient’s immune system. So I re-trained in that area and then started my lab in 2012 at the University of Calgary using a variety of approaches,” he told LWC.
One of those approaches is designer immune cell therapy, where doctors harvest a patient’s immune system, purify specific immune cells and genetically “rewire” them to understand and kill the cancer more effectively. Currently in Alberta, one type of designer immune cell therapy called Car T therapy is now approved for use and available to patients with certain types of blood cancers.
“It’s probably the most advanced medicine that the field of biomedical science has ever produced. It’s a game changer for patients with certain types of blood cancers and so we work largely in that area now, where we are trying to rewire immune cells in a patient to better see and then kill their own cancer,” Mahoney said.
“Science works that way. We learn more. We learn what areas are fruitful and what areas are not fruitful, and we begin to track the areas that are more fruitful But a lot of it is also driven by technological advances.”
There is new cancer-fighting technology that is being researched and produced every day, Mahoney added.
“I would argue we have the ability to act. We have genetic engineering tools that allow us to do synthetic biology in ways that impart new functions onto therapeutic cells, like immune cells … That’s why the field can move so fast: it is because we’re learning so much more now than we were able to before, and we can act on that knowledge,” the assistant professor said.
Funding from Canadian Cancer Society ‘exciting’: Mahoney
Mahoney said the move to clinical trials wouldn’t have been possible without generous funding from the Canadian Cancer Society. While the $9.5 million was bestowed four years ago, he and his team weren’t able to announce and celebrate it until November this year due to public health restrictions during the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Cancer research is expensive because it requires highly specialized people, equipment, laboratories and reagents to conduct, he added. Experiments also often fail before they can be approved for early-phase human clinical trials.
“It’s philanthropic gifts like that that allow us to make real progress to move the needle. The work that we do is expensive … We fail fast, fail often, learn as much as we can to eventually move the needle forward,” the assistant professor said.
“To have the Canadian Cancer Society step in and fund this work to that degree is really transformative. It really allowed us to build out an ecosystem here at the University of Calgary and at AHS where we now have many scientists working in this area. And importantly, it allowed us to begin to move some of the early experimental treatments that we were developing in the lab into clinical trials.”
Mahoney hopes that there will be more effective and accessible treatments for patients with all types of cancers, including rare ones. He wants more funding for agile investigational product development, where new medicines that have been studied for years in pre-clinical models to demonstrate safety and efficacy are then used in human patients over a long period.
“Ultimately, my view is that in these cellular immunotherapies, the most important part is to have an ecosystem that allows us to do that quickly and fluidly, so that we can get to learning from the patient experience as quickly as possible, and that way we can bring that learning back into the research lab and we can solve problems that we’re observing in the human patients,” Mahoney said.
He also hopes that the funding and new technologies will inspire undergraduate and graduate students to pursue careers in cancer research. Many people who start cancer research are often driven by personal stories, which drives scholarly research in this area of expertise, he added.
“You need to have a certain type of personality, I think, to succeed. There are many characteristics, but one of them is that you need to constantly have the long game in mind. You need to be very patient … You need to be anxious so that you’re pushing hard, but you need to be pushing hard for years through lots of failure,” Mahoney said.
“I did have the opportunity over the last year and a half to see a patient receive a medicine that my team had built for the first time – and that’s why we do it.”
