The UF Health Cancer Center has been selected as one of 12 initial clinical trial sites participating in Precision Promise, the first largescale precision medicine trial designed to transform outcomes for patients with pancreatic cancer. An initiative of the national nonprofit organization Pancreatic Cancer Action Network, Precision Promise is intended to dramatically accelerate the clinical trial process to bring promising therapies to patients faster. “Being an inaugural member of the Precision Promise clinical trial consortium ensures that our patients have access to some of the most cutting edge and innovative therapies available in the world for pancreatic cancer,” said Thomas George, M.D., principal investigator at UF and medical director of the GI Oncology Program. “The tools to help our patients fight pancreatic cancer and advance the field are now at our ready.”

When patients get treated for cancer, radiation therapy administered to shrink tumors also affects healthy cells in the gastrointestinal tract and causes difficult side effects such as nausea, vomiting and diarrhea. Now a group of UF Health researchers has learned more about how a set of amino acids, formulated as a rehydration drink, helps the small intestine repair itself after radiation therapy. The researchers were already aware that the formulation improved gastrointestinal function, but the new findings — published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports — reveal its beneficial action on intestinal stem cells. This holds some promise for cancer patients, who typically can’t tolerate a full therapeutic dose of radiation. By increasing their tolerance, more patients might be able to receive the full tumor-killing dose of radiation therapy, said Sadasivan Vidyasagar, M.D., Ph.D., a professor in the UF College of Medicine’s department of radiation oncology.

A UF researcher has received a five-year, $1.7 million grant to study when, how and why prostate cancer, which physicians consider highly curable, sometimes spreads, and to develop treatment options for this uncommon but life-threatening occurrence. The National Cancer Institute supported study is focused on bone metastasis, which occurs when cancer cells spread from the original site to other places in the body and is linked to high mortality in prostate cancer patients. “Our study will provide insights that will increase our ability to identify risk factors associated with metastasis and offer the possibility of developing selective antimetastasis therapies,” said principal investigator Dietmar Siemann, Ph.D., associate chair and the John P. Cofrin professor in radiation therapy in the department of radiation oncology in the UF College of Medicine.

For the first time, UF Health cardiologists have implanted stem cells into the heart of a breast cancer survivor with heart failure in a Phase 1 clinical trial that will examine the feasibility and safety of treating these kinds of patients with stem cells. In the next phases of clinical trials, the researchers will be studying whether stem cells from healthy subjects can improve heart function in patients who have been treated with a group of drugs called anthracyclines, chemotherapy drugs that are still used today.

UF Health neuro-oncologist David Tran, M.D., Ph.D., has been awarded a $1.78 million grant from the Florida Department of Health’s Bankhead-Coley Cancer Research Program to develop new strategies to target disseminated tumor cells in triple-negative breast cancer. Tran, chief of the neuro-oncology division in the UF College of Medicine’s department of neurosurgery, began the five-year study last March; for the smaller early phase of the study, patients with metastatic breast cancer of any type who have undergone all available standard treatment can participate.

A UF Health researcher is studying a natural therapy for treating liver cancer, one of the leading causes of cancerrelated deaths in the world. Thomas Schmittgen, Ph.D., a professor of pharmaceutics in the UF College of Pharmacy, is identifying novel treatments and new ways to deliver those therapies by restoring microRNA in the hopes of finding options for people with the disease. MicroRNAs are tiny strands of molecules that serve as important gene regulators in the body. Liver cancers can form when certain microRNA molecules disappear from healthy cells. In a $3.2 million National Institutes of Health-funded study, Schmittgen and coinvestigator Mitch Phelps, Ph.D., an associate professor at The Ohio State University, are attempting to restore the microRNA within cells to healthy levels.

University of Florida Health researchers have slowed a notoriously aggressive type of brain tumor in mouse models by using a low-carbohydrate diet. Glioblastoma, the most common brain tumor in adults, has no effective long-term treatment, but researchers found a high-fat, lowcarbohydrate diet that included a coconut oil derivative helped reduce the growth of glioblastoma tumor cells and extended lifespan in mouse models by 50 percent.

“While this is an effective treatment in our preclinical animal models, it is not a cure. However, our results are promising enough that the next step is to test this in humans,” said Brent Reynolds, Ph.D., a professor in the Lillian S. Wells Department of Neurosurgery.