About half the people who get a kind of mouth cancer called oral squamous cell carcinoma will die from it, and UT Health San Antonio School of Dentistry researcher Cara Gonzales, DDS, PhD says that hasn’t changed in 50 years. One reason for that is that people don’t seek treatment until the cancer has spread.
“Seeing a dentist is almost a luxury because it's expensive,” Gonzales, an assistant professor of comprehensive dentistry, said. “Not a lot of insurances cover it, and unfortunately, a lot of patients, even when they go to a physician, physicians don't always know what they're looking at.”
Often, oral squamous cell carcinoma has already spread to the lymph nodes by the time patients seek treatment, and the few treatment options for cancers of the mouth create other challenges.
Assistant Professor
Department of Comprehensive Dentistry
The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio
“So these poor patients not only suffer from difficulty eating, speaking, disfigurement, but then also pain, because we just don't have a lot of good drugs to treat their pain as well,” she said.
But Gonzales has developed a drug she thinks might change the game. CICD99 is a first-in-class drug targeting a novel anti-cancer pathway. Her team has tested CICD99 in mice, and it shrank oral tumors when injected directly into them. Did it work when delivered systemically to treat cancer that has spread beyond the mouth?
“Lo and behold, it had an even better effect than our intra-tumor injections,” Gonzales said. “And we saw this consistently in repeated models.”
Gonzales said the drug has few side effects in mice.
“They don't lose weight; they don't have any respiratory or cardiovascular issues. We don't see any cardiotoxicity,” Gonzales said. “So this has all been really exciting.
Now, Gonzales has to prove the drug has enough potential for a pharmaceutical company to invest in human clinical trials. To fund that work, she and her company, Keraceuticals, have received a $400,000 Small Business Technology Transfer grant from the National Institutes of Health.
“So with this grant, our goal is to show that it doesn't have cardiotoxicity, that it is well tolerated, that we can formulate it, and that when we put it in this formulation, it still works,” Gonzales said. If they can do all that, they may get a clinical trial, which she hopes would happen here.
“CICD99 was conceived of here at the Health Science Center in collaboration with the Center for Innovative Drug Discovery,” Gonzales said. “and it would be such a joy to see it atested in our patient population here at the Mays Cancer Center.”
Science & Medicine is a collaboration between TPR and The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio that explores how scientific discovery in San Antonio advances the way medicine is practiced everywhere.
