The CHEMOWARRIOR Foundation is currently helping to fund exciting Ewing sarcoma research being conducted at MD Anderson Cancer Center, the Cleveland Clinic and Dana Farber Cancer Institute. The money we raised in 2017 – 2019 went towards the following projects:

We are helping to fund the trial of a revolutionary new Microdevice by Dr. Joseph Ludwig at MD Anderson Cancer Center.

The microdevice is about the size of a grain of rice and contains 18 reservoirs to hold small doses of single drugs or drug combinations. It is implanted in a tumor and the drugs are dispensed. After 24 hours, the device and surrounding tissue are removed for analysis to gauge how well each drug impacted the tumor.

This powerful technology promises to bring more hope to Ewing’s patients by leading to better treatment options, improved drug selection, the discovery of the best drug combinations and efficient future clinical trials. It will revolutionize the drug discovery pipeline by quickly identifying the most effective drugs based upon their effects in real patient tumors rather than laboratory models. Promising drugs will still require testing but the microdevice data will aid researchers by advancing only those drugs and/or drug combinations that have proven most effective.

MD Anderson hopes to start enrolling Ewing’s patients in a clinical trial starting in 2021.

We lent financial support for the opening of a new clinical trial for Ewing sarcoma by Dr. Steven DuBois at Dana Farber Cancer Institute.

 This is a phase 2 trial of the combination of ganitumab (IGF-1R inhibitor) and palbociclib (CDK4/6 inhibitor).  The trial can skip the phase 1 stage because both drugs being used have already received FDA approval.  These two drugs are not chemotherapy and should have fewer negative side effects in patients.  Alone, they have both been shown to be effective anti tumor agents against Ewing’s sarcoma but they have never been studied in combination.  The combination is based upon laboratory data showing that blocking both pathways results in synergistic anti tumor effects in models of Ewing sarcoma.

This trial is open and currently recruiting patients and inital results look promising. Information is available at:

https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04129151

In this case, we are most pleased to note that we came together with four other foundations to provide complete funding for the launch of this clinical trial.  We hope to collaborate in a similar fashion on future projects.

We helped fund the initial work on a project to investigate collateral sensitivity in cancer drugs by Dr. Jacob Scott at the Cleveland Clinic.

Dr. Scott is developing a novel approach that is based on evolutionary biology to take advantage of the weaknesses that cancer cells expose themselves to as they evolve and mutate against a specific drug, something called “collateral sensitivity.” His process will also help predict which next drug may most effectively exploit that weakness and kill the cancer cells.  Ewing sarcoma is one of the focuses of Dr. Scott’s research. Our early support of this groundbreaking work has lead to funding from the American Cancer Society and NIH, in addition to other foundations.  Dr. Scott is gearing up to expand his research, with the goal of getting to trials in the next 18 months. We are considering providing more financial support to Dr. Scott’s lab this year.