Indian American professor receives Department of Defense funding for lung cancer research

SAN FRANCISCO (Diya TV) – Animesh Ray, a professors at the Keck Graduate Institute, recently saw his research on lung cancer drug resistance approved for further funding by the U.S. Department of Defense.

His research, titled, “A novel approach to understand and prevent the evolution of drug resistant lung cancer cells: A feasibility study,” focuses on the resistance of lung cancer drugs and will aim to examine the emergence of therapy resistant forms of lung cancer using state-of-the-art advances in genomic technology.

The re-emergence of drug resistant lung cancers in patients who initially responded to treatment is a major cause of death, according to a press release from the institute. While several lung cancer patients who exhibit the spread of cancer to other parts of the body respond well to treatment with anti-cancer drugs, there has been sufficient documentation that the cancer can return aggressively, having developed resistance to the drugs used to treat the original cancers.

“When lung cancers are targeted with an anti-cancer drug, the genome of the cancer cells, due to their robustness, can find ways to become resistant to drugs,” Ray said in a statement. “The current research proposal aims to use next-generation DNA sequence technology coupled with CRISPR technology to address this problem.”

“The hope is that this preliminary work will help discover a new approach to prevent the appearance of relapsed drug resistant cancer,” he added.

The study intends to target and prevent the adaptation of cancer cells to drugs, with the ultimate goal of undercutting the major factor of death in regards to lung cancer. It will employ the use of a recently developed genome-wide gene-targeting technology coupled with massively parallel DNA sequencing, followed by computational modeling.

Should the research prove successful, the result would benefit patients who have been treated for metastatic lung cancers and who are the among the most vulnerable lung cancer patients to succumb to the disease.

Ray further believes a success would represent a new paradigm of cancer treatment, in which a novel class of drugs with relatively low toxicity can be developed. The drugs, additionally, are expected to be less toxic than current anti-cancer drugs, he said.

Ray, who is currently on leave from Keck serving as a visiting faculty member at Caltech, has been a professor at the institute for 15 years. He has previously served in teaching capacities at U.C. San Diego, the University of Rochester and the Institute for Systems Biology.

It is important to note that people should be doing all that they can to reduce the risks of cancer and one of the biggest causes of this form of cancer is smoking. People should be attempting to try and quit smoking in order to improve their health and try to reduce the chances of getting lung cancer. For this people have started to try things like snus such as using Oden’s extreme portion, in order to slowly reduce the levels of nicotine consumption and try to take less and less until they have stopped. Although lung cancer treatments are becoming better it is still important that everyone does their best to reduce the chances of getting cancer.