Smoking changes lung cells, ups cancer risk

2 US scientists awarded Balzan Prize for cancer research

WASHINGTON, Sept 12, (Agencies): Chronic exposure to cigarette smoke can change lung cells over time, making them more vulnerable to disease and priming them to develop cancer, US researchers said Monday.

The report in the journal Cancer Cell is based on lab experiments on lung cells that were exposed to chronic cigarette smoke — the equivalent of a person smoking for 20 to 30 years.

After about 10 days, the cells began to change their gene expression, a process known as epigenetic change.

It took 10 months before these changes built up enough to boost the odds of cancer.

“When you’re smoking, you are building up a substrate of epigenetic changes that we hypothesize are increasing your mathematics for developing lung cancer”, said senior author Stephen Baylin, co-director of the Cancer Biology program Johns Hopkins University.

“Because if you’re not a smoker, your risk of lung cancer is very low”.

These epigenetic abnormalities essentially turn off multiple genes which are needed to help protect normal cells from developing cancer.

Epigenetic changes do not alter, or mutate, the basic DNA sequence of the gene, suggesting that there is hope for people who want to quit smoking.

“This work suggests the possibility that unlike mutations, which are harder to reverse, if you stop smoking at a certain time and duration, then you have a chance to decrease your mathematics that might be due to the buildup of epigenetic changes”, said first author Michelle Vaz, a postdoctoral researcher at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

“The hypothesis is that there are potentially reversible changes that are contributing to a certain set of lung cancers”.

Cancer doctors are widening the net for immunotherapy, a hot new class of drugs that enlist the body’s defences in the fight against tumours.

The latest research shared with 23,000 experts at Europe’s top oncology meeting shows how medicines that have already delivered durable benefits in metastatic disease can also work well at an earlier stage.

The findings promise to expand the market for established immuno-oncology (I-O) drugs from companies like Merck, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Roche, while opening up a window for relative latecomers such as AstraZeneca.

Bristol-Myers, meanwhile, proved that Opdivo, which is already used widely in advanced cancer, can prevent relapses in melanoma patients if given straight after surgery. This earlier setting is known as adjuvant therapy.

The data on both drugs highlight how so-called PD-1 and PD-L1 drugs are moving down the treatment curve to earlier-stage disease.

“The aim is to help more and more patients in earlier phases of the disease, like in adjuvant therapy”, ESMO President Fortunato Ciardiello told Reuters.

“I think this will be a trend that will increase over the next few years, though we have to cautious because we have to do the proper clinical trials to prove this in each case”.

I-O drugs are now being investigated in the adjuvant setting in a range of cancers, including lung, kidney and bladder — and some trials are even underway in the neoadjuvant or presurgery setting in the case of breast and head and neck cancers.

By taking the brakes off the immune system and allowing the body’s natural killer cells to home in on tumours, immunotherapy offers a different approach to toxic chemotherapy, which causes collateral damage to healthy tissue.

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Two US scientists whose work has contributed to creating immunological treatments for cancer are among the winners of this year’s Balzan Prizes, announced Monday, recognizing scholarly and scientific achievements.

James Allison of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and Robert Schreiber of the Washington University School of Medicine were cited for their work on antibody treatments that has increased the survival of patients with metastatic melanoma.

The Balzan Foundation awards two prizes in the sciences and two in the humanities each year, rotating specialties to highlight new or emerging areas of research and sustain fields that might be overlooked elsewhere. Recipients receive 750,000 Swiss francs ($790,000), half of which must be used for research, preferably by young scholars or scientists.

Nobel Prize-winner Jules Hoffman, a presenter of the awards, said the work focusing on using the immune system to fight cancer, expanding from the traditional treatments of removal, radiation and chemotherapy, has already had success in 25 to 30 percent of melanoma patients in a study who had previously gone through the traditional battery of treatments. It is now being developed for small cell lung cancer and rectal cancer. Other winners are: Belgian astrophysicist Michael Gillon for his work that has helped map new solar systems from the comfort of planet Earth, using robotic telescopes instead of much more costly satellites.

Germans Aleida and Jan Assmann, a married couple recognized for their work presenting collective memory “as a requirement for the formation of the identity of religious and political communities”.

Indian economist Bina Agarwal, a professor at the University of Manchester, recognized in the gender studies category for her “heroic” work studying women’s contributions to agriculture in India.

This year, the Balzan Foundation also awarded a fifth prize, in international relations, which was deferred from last year after the committee failed to reach agreement on a winner. It went to Robert O. Keohane of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, best known for his influential 1984 book “After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy”.