The blood-brain barrier keeps bad actors like toxins, viruses, and bacteria from entering the brain. But in the case of brain cancer when the danger is already inside, the blood-brain barrier can work against a person’s health by shutting out the medications meant to eliminate the threat. Dr. Sadhana Jackson from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) works to figure out ways to selectively get cancer treatments through the blood-brain barrier to treat patients with certain types of brain tumors known as gliomas.
In this episode, Dr. Richard Childs, a senior investigator and Clinical Director of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), recounts his experience using the antiviral remdesivir to treat patients with COVID-19 in one of the early hot zones of the pandemic. He led a team sent to care for passengers on the Diamond Princess cruise ship that was held in quarantine in Yokohama, Japan at the start of the outbreak. Since then, remdesivir has continued to gain traction as a possible standard of care. Dr. Matthew Hall, biology group leader at the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), explains the development of the drug and its newfound purpose in the battle against the novel coronavirus.
Radioactive drugs carry radioactive substances that can be engineered to specifically target and kill tumor cells inside the body. In 2018, the FDA approved a radioactive drug called Lutathera to treat tumors that affect the pancreas or gastrointestinal tract. Now, scientists at the NIH led by Dr. Frank Lin are testing whether Lutathera can also be effective against rare tumors of the adrenal glands. Dr. Lin is a clinician and researcher focused on bringing radioactive drugs — also known as radionuclides — from bench to bedside. His work could accelerate the development of new therapies for patients with rare cancers who have few or no other treatment options.
This episode features two legends of biomedical research. In the realm of human health and longevity, cancer’s ability to mutate, grow, and thwart the body’s natural defenses presents one of the greatest scientific challenges of our time. In 2001, Dr. Ira Pastan led the creation of a new type of cancer drug, a recombinant immunotoxin, that promised to directly target and kill cancer cells. After years of research and clinical trials, this first-generation immunotoxin was approved by the FDA in September 2018 for certain adults with hairy cell leukemia, providing a promising new therapy to a group of patients who previously had few other options.
And we have a special guest host for this episode, Dr. Michael Gottesman, who, as the NIH Deputy Director for Intramural Research, leads the thousands of researchers and clinicians working within the IRP each day — while also conducting groundbreaking research in his own laboratory into how cancer cells become resistant to chemotherapy and other anti-cancer drugs. Drs. Gottesman and Pastan are two guiding lights in our quest to overcome the obstacles to effectively treating cancer in order to improve and save potentially millions of lives. As friends and colleagues for many years, they also trained and collaborated with several of the most celebrated IRP researchers who made extraordinary breakthroughs for human health.
