Sidebar: FDA-Approved Drug May Treat Head and Neck Cancer
As the sixth most common cancer in the developed world, squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck affects about 45,000 people in the United States. Many of these tumors have disfiguring effects on the mouth, lips and face, and they also can disrupt a person's ability to eat and swallow. Even more troubling, about half of the people diagnosed with this type of cancer die within five years, and this statistic has not changed much in the past three decades.
J. Silvio Gutkind, Ph.D., chief of the Oral and Pharyngeal Cancer Branch, Cell Growth Regulation Section, and Molecular Carcinogenesis Section in NIDCR's Division of Intramural Research, has made major strides in combating this difficult disease. After learning that a particular molecular pathway is often revved up in head and neck cancer cells, Gutkind developed a mouse model system to study it further.
In this model, all of the mice develop mouth or tongue tumors after being exposed to a cancer-causing chemical that mimics the effects of tobacco exposure in people. (Tobacco use, in addition to excessive alcohol intake, are main causes of head and neck cancer.)
Since Gutkind and his team already knew that the drug rapamycin could block this overactive molecular pathway, he tried giving it to the mice. Also called Rapamune®, rapamycin was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1999 for preventing kidney transplant rejection. Remarkably, not only did rapamycin shrink existing tumors in the mice, it also blocked new ones from forming6, 7. The work points to a new, molecular-targeted approach for treating head and neck cancer.