VCU: $13M grant helps scientists work to change the way liver cancer is treated

A group of researchers at VCU Massey Comprehensive Cancer Center was awarded $13 million by the National Cancer Institute to collectively unearth new, effective drug combinations for liver cancer.

The five-year grant – the first P01 grant ever awarded to Massey in its five-decade history – will initiate a four-pronged approach to better understand the biology of liver tumors and advanced treatment options for hepatocellular carcinoma, the most common form of liver cancer.

“There are no other large, grant-funded projects like this in the country for obesity-associated liver cancer; it has the potential to change the way the disease is treated,” said Devanand Sarkar, M.B.B.S., Ph.D., the principal investigator on the grant, as well as associate director of cancer research training and education coordination and member of the Cancer Biology research program at Massey.

“Within the umbrella of this grant, we have four separate research projects asking different molecular questions, but with the same ultimate goal of identifying how we can exploit our findings to improve the efficacy of immunotherapy in liver cancer,” Sarkar said.

When diagnosed early, liver tumors are generally small and can be removed surgically or a liver transplant can be successfully performed. However, liver cancer is usually diagnosed when the tumor is much larger in size, the disease has spread to other organs and other associated health problems have already occurred.

Currently, there are a few available treatment options for liver cancer, including a combination of immunotherapies and a class of drugs known as tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs), but their long-term effects are limited.

“Clinical trials show that immunotherapy is effective in less than one-third of liver cancer patients, and nearly 100 percent of patients who are treated with TKIs invariably develop resistance to the drugs within one year,” said Sarkar, who holds the Harrison Foundation Distinguished Professorship in Cancer Research at Massey and has been studying HCC throughout his career. “Even with the current treatments that are available for advanced disease, the patient survival rates are roughly less than two years.”