An $18 million grant awarded to the Myeloma Institute for Research and Therapy will help in the treatment of bone marrow cancer and in the search for a cure, doctors say.
The grant, announced Wednesday, was the third awarded the institute by the National Cancer Institute and was among the largest ever given a University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences program.
Myeloma kills about 12,000 people in the United States each year.
Dr. Bart Barlogie, director of the Myeloma Institute and a recognized world authority on bone marrow cancer, said the money was a reward for groundbreaking treatments already developed at UAMS and an expectation of future advancements.
The grant was double the amount of the first grant awarded the Myeloma Institute in 1992. Over the 12-year period, patient survival rates have increased from 5 percent to about 40 percent, Barlogie told The Associated Press on Tuesday.
"While the average person with this disease is much better off than they were five years ago, there are still people with miserable outcomes and I think this (grant) allows us to approach their disease in a smarter fashion and extend their lives in a meaningful way," he said.
The National Cancer Institute is an arm of the National Institutes of Health. NCI reviewers visited Little Rock in February to inspect the Myeloma Institute's research facilities and view project plans.
What they found was a program that was performing more bone marrow stem-cell transplant procedures than anyone else, Barlogie said.
Last month, the UAMS team performed its 5,000th transplant. With the world's largest sample at its fingertips, the team developed a more effective double-transplant procedure and identified a protein in normal bone marrow that helps myeloma perform its destruction.
Developing that further is the short-term goal, and figuring out which treatment method is best for different types of patients is the long-term goal.
"We have demonstrated we can target the environment of the bone marrow without specifically attacking the myeloma," Barlogie said. "In the fifth year of the funding cycle, hopefully we'll have the tools to say this patient will be best served by blocking this pathway or this one by doing something else."
The grant will be used to fund four research projects and four shared laboratory functions through 2009. The core projects are headed by Barlogie; Dr. Guido Tricot, director of clinical research; John Shaughnessy Jr., director of the genetics laboratory; and Ralph Sanderson, director of research.
Wednesday was Myeloma Awareness Day at UAMS.
