Jim Olson, M.D., Ph.D., a brain tumor physician and scientist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington, talks about a new drug that could help surgeons more safely remove brain tumors.
Interview conducted by Ivanhoe Broadcast News January 2017.
Take me back to how you first got this idea of tumors and painting them.
Dr. Olson: Tumor paint was inspired by a patient we took care of in 2004. It was a sixteen year old girl who had a day long and in to the night operation. Even with all the experienced surgeons, a big piece of cancer was left behind because they thought it was normal brain and they didn’t want to hurt her. That day we decided we were going to find a way to make the cancer light up, and we had no idea how we were going to do it. We didn’t start thinking about scorpions, we were driven by a patient case to solve a really important problem.
Then how did you get the scorpions were you testing different—-
Dr. Olson: No, this molecule is the only molecule we ever worked with. We didn’t test thousands or millions of compounds; we did it intellectually. We went through all the literature, all the computer data basis and each day we looked for things that differentially bound to cancer compared to normal brain. Eventually we came across this beautiful work by a group down in Alabama that was studying how ions move in to cells and out of cells and they happened to be using brain tumor cells to study a scorpion toxin. I thought: could that channel distinguish a brain tumor from a normal brain? And let’s try it. We linked the scorpion molecule to a little molecular flashlight, we injected it in to the tail vein of a mouse that had a tumor growing on its back and about an hour later the tumor was glowing and the rest of the mouse wasn’t. We’ve been working on that program ever since.
That’s so amazing.
What’s being used now, it’s not actually scorpion venom? You’ve created a medicine that’s like blocking it?
Dr. Olson: Scorpion venom contains thousands of molecules and the one that we use in to our paint is just one of those. We don’t actually isolate it from scorpions we take the DNA code off the computer and we make it synthetically. There’s nothing that comes from scorpions that ever goes in to patients.
Talk about why it’s so needed especially in the brain. Is it you know you don’t want to leave behind the cancer but also you don’t want to take something——
Dr. Olson: Exactly. Many studies have shown that kids who have a good surgical removal of their cancer, where you can’t see any bulky disease at the end of the surgery, have about a thirty to fifty percent better survival rate than kids that don’t. It requires less chemotherapy, less radiation therapy, a lot less side effects if you get a good surgery up front. You don’t want to just take a big margin around the cancer like you would for other types of cancer because that could be the part of the brain that’s important for speech or thinking or remembering, so it’s really important to be able to very clearly distinguish the cancer from the normal.
It’s fascinating and brain cancer it’s just a horrible, traumatic, terrible thing. And so you said children but you also have done this in adults.
Dr. Olson: Yes, we have now treated over seventy five patients with tumor paint both children and adults. It’s important to us to look at this in children concurrently with adults. We don’t wait and see what it showed in adults; we’re going with kids simultaneously.
Do you want to walk me through what year did you start, the time line, what’s the future?
Dr. Olson: We started on tumor paint in 2004; we published the first paper in 2007. In 2011, the technology was licensed to Blaze Bioscience Company. We started to bring this over the finish line in 2014 when we enrolled our first patient. We’ve now treated over seventy five patients in four clinical trials. We anticipate starting our definitive trial for the FDA this coming year and our hope is that we’ll achieve first FDA approval in 2019.
If somebody is watching this and has this scenario they can’t just go in to their hospitals?
Dr. Olson: Yeah. The first clinical trial in children with brain tumors is occurring now at Seattle Children’s, and within the year we’ll open that trial in fifteen additional sites across the country so all the leading centers will be having this available within the year.
And then for adults is that—-
Dr. Olson: That’s going to be a little later and probably not good to go in to it right now because we don’t know the exact time.
In theory, in 2019 this could be something more widespread, not just the trials and studies?
Dr. Olson: Yeah, we’re hoping for our first approval and once we have that approval we can promote it for use for that exact type of cancer.
Is it all brain cancer or just a specific—-
Dr. Olson: I would just say brain cancer for now. We’ve seen it work in many kinds of brain cancer.
What’s the outcome been like for the seventy five patients?
Dr. Olson: So far we’re seeing that tumor paint lights up almost every type of brain cancer we’ve looked at. We also find that there’s activity, in our experience, in women who have breast cancer and in patients with skin cancer. It’s possible that tumor paint could help as many as two and a half million patients a year if these early trials are an indicator of later success.
How cool would that be?
Dr. Olson: That would be very cool.
What are the concerns of doctors who are not using this procedure, why aren’t they obviously it’s not available yet widespread. Who funded the study?
Dr. Olson: The interesting thing about tumor paint is that when we first had our initial data showing it lit up human cancers in mice, I wrote many grants and none of those grants were funded. It was our patient families that started having chili cook offs and greeting card sales and all together those families raised eight million dollars that allowed us to get tumor paint to the point where we are at right now.
So it’s the people?
Dr. Olson: Yeah, it’s their community.
Anything I’m missing, maybe is it exciting for you to see—
Dr. Olson: Oh, I can’t tell you. We hope that Tumor Paint will increase the number of children who survive brain cancer and reduce the side effects that are related to the challenges of distinguishing cancer from normal brain during surgery.
And for their families too.
Dr. Olson: Absolutely.
I think at Children’s Hospital they’re mentioning right now are the surgeons like able to use it and guide them or is that the next step?
Dr. Olson: In pediatrics specifically, at the end of the case, if the surgeons see a green glowing tissue and they believe in a surgical judgment that it might be cancer they can take it out at their own discretion.
If they see it glowing the surgery right now they can take it. She had said they don’t have the right black light or whatever the light is.
Dr. Olson: There are better instruments on the way.
END OF INTERVIEW
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