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Cancer patients turning to mice for hopes of a cure
In lab some carry bits of their tumours so treatments can be tried first on the customised rodents
PUBLISHED : Monday, 15 December, 2014, 9:08pm
UPDATED : Monday, 15 December, 2014, 9:08pm
Associated Press
Charles Cook, manager of facilities and operations at Champions Oncology, displays mouse carrying a cancer patient's tumor graft under its skin. Photo:AP
Scientists often test drugs in mice. Now some cancer patients are doing the same – with the hope of curing their own disease.
They are paying a private lab to breed mice that carry bits of their own tumours so treatments can be tried first on the customised rodents. The idea is to see which drugs might work best on an individual’s specific cancer.
The mice may help patients make what can be very hard choices under difficult circumstances. Studies can suggest a certain chemotherapy may help, but patients wonder whether it will work for them. Often there’s more than one choice, and if the first one fails, a patient may be too sick to try another. So hundreds of people have made “mouse avatars” over the last few years to test chemotherapies.
“What I’m doing is personalised cancer treatment. It’s the wave of the future,” said Eileen Youtie, a Miami woman using mice to guide care for her hard-to-treat form of breast cancer. “Part of this is trying to eliminate chemos that are not going to work on me. I don’t want to waste time taking them and poison my body,” she said.
But there are no guarantees the mice will help.
“There’s not a lot of science” to say how well this works, and it should be considered highly experimental, said Dr. Len Lichtenfeld, deputy chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society.
There are some early encouraging reports, he said. One study of 70 patients found the mice generally reflected how well patients responded to various drugs. But there is no evidence that using mice is any better than care based on medical guidelines or the gene tests that many patients get now to help pick drugs.
The mouse testing costs US$10,000 or more, and insurers in the US don’t cover it. It takes several months, so patients usually have to start therapy before mouse results are in.
“I do see promise, but it’s very time-consuming, it’s very expensive. For the average patient, standard care is going to be the way to go,” said Alana Welm, who is a cancer researcher at the Medial Rearch Foundation in Oklahoma in the US.
Several labs breed these mice, but the main supplier to patients has been Champions Oncology, a company based in New Jersey, that also operates in London, Tel Aviv and Singapore.
About 7,000 mice are kept in a Baltimore lab in six rooms with tall shelves that hold row upon row of plastic cages labelled with each cancer patient’s name.
Most mice are white-haired females with beady red eyes, but others are hairless. All have easy access to food and water, and many bear signs of the tumour graft – a shaved portion of hair, an incision scar and a lump growing off one side.
Patients have a tumour sample sent to Champions, which charges US$1,500 to bank it, plus US$2,500 for each drug tested in groups of mice implanted with bits of the tumour.
Most patients try three to five drugs and spend between US$10,000 to US$12,000, said Champions’ chief medical officer, Dr. Angela Davies.
Youtie spent US$30,000 “because I want them to test all the possible drugs”.
That approach helped Yaron Panov, a 59-year-old Toronto man diagnosed four years ago with liposarcoma, a soft-tissue cancer. No specific drugs were recommended, and “I was given six months to live”, he said.
Tests on his avatar mice suggested the first drug he was prescribed would not work but that one for colon cancer might.
“It was working on the mice so I knew it would work on me,” he said. “It’s such a boost of confidence” and it makes it easier to endure side effects, said Panov, whose cancer is in remission.
