Oregon Health & Science University Knight Cancer Institute researchers uncovered a gene that may be the key to helping kidney cancer patients who don’t respond to current therapies. This discovery could also provide a toolkit to identify patients who are most likely to benefit from drugs that block this gene from causing cancer cells to grow.

The OHSU study, published in the June 1 edition of Science Translational Medicine, identified a gene called Src that helps certain kidney cancers grow. Discovering that Src plays a role in kidney cancer could help in delivering more effective, individualized treatments to patients, said George Thomas, MD, Associate Professor, Department of Pathology, the study’s senior author and a surgical pathologist at the OHSU Knight Cancer Institute.

The next step, said Dr. Thomas , is initiating clinical trials to test how these tumors respond to drugs already available and approved by the FDA.

 

• The full OHSU media release is available online