Cutting edge research, it's happening here

By Charles Sowell  

MARCH 3, 2011 9:18 p.m. (0)

ITOR, which is housed in the Cancer Centers of the Carolinas at the Greenville Hospital System University Medical Center, has done pioneering work on cancer treatments for years.

It has just been approved as a bone marrow donor site and is the only hospital in the Upstate to have a Foundation for the Accreditation of Cellular Therapy accreditation.

ITOR is one of a few sites in the country where bone marrow can be harvested on site and then shipped to hospitals in other parts of the country to treat leukemia.

Before, a donor had to travel to make a donation.

Fehrman has breast cancer. She was diagnosed in 1992 with stage two of the disease and underwent a needle biopsy and lumpectomy.  She ended up having a mastectomy and suffered through six months of chemotherapy.

She remained in remission for 11 years.

“I went on with my life,” she said. “And it was a busy life.”

At the time her disease was diagnosed Fehrman was 44 with three children. She and her husband raised the children and saw them off to college. Then in 2003 she had a cough.

She went to her doctor, who didn’t like what he heard.

From there it was a visit with the chest x-ray machine and bad news. Her cancer, the breast cancer, had returned and had popped up in both lungs in five places and two places on her liver.

She started a regimen of chemotherapy from 2003 until 2007 when things began to look grim.

Dr. W. Larry Gluck, medical director of Oncology Services at Greenville Hospital System University Medical Center, which is the home of ITOR, and the ITOR team went to work on Fehrman’s case.

“A patient is referred to us and on their first visit are joined with a medical team (that includes doctors, nurses and specialists in x-ray and other fields). Often a patient will see more doctors and specialists in the first week than they would normally see in many weeks of conventional treatment,” Gluck said.

In Fehrman’s case a genetic analysis of her cancer found she would be responsive to a drug normally not used in breast cancer cases.

“They do a biopsy of a living tumor,” Fehrman said. “And tailor the treatment program to deal with the individual and the characteristics of the tumor.”

The result in short order was amazing, Fehrman said.

“They stopped the cancer.”

Not cured. Stopped it and the tumors began to shrink, Fehrman said.

At this point medicine began to seem more like wizardry for Fehrman.

But magic is not the business of the specialists at ITOR; they deal in hard facts and cutting edge technology, said Joe J. Stephenson, Jr., medical director at ITOR.

“What we’re doing is developing treatments and testing new drugs here,” he said. “The patients are the beneficiaries, of course.”

Society benefits, too, since it can take decades for a drug to make its way onto the market. With the kinds of research done at ITOR and the sheer numbers of patients things can move along at a quicker pace.

ITOR is on the verge of finalizing an agreement with a Houston hospital to do stage one testing of Prolanta, a new drug to treat ovarian and breast cancers being tested at Greenville Memorial. An announcement is expected in March.

Stage one testing is the most difficult of the three phases new drugs must undergo before winning Food and Drug Administration approval for general use.

The relationship between ITOR and other researchers and drug makers enables the doctors there to use treatments and drug cocktails to treat cancer not available generally.

ITOR’s specialists tailor treatments to match the genetic make up of each individual and each patient.

“Just a few years ago it was not possible to do the kinds of testing that we do today,” Stephenson said.

“When you think about the $3 billion and years of work that went into mapping the human genome and where we are today the difference is really apparent,” he said.

When science gets to the point where a workable genetic test of a cancer costs about $1,000 and can be ready in days instead of weeks then the science of cancer treatment will be ready to take off, said W. Jeffery Edenfield, associate medical director at ITOR.

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