Host
Heather Simonsen, MA
Public Affairs Senior Manager
Huntsman Cancer Institute
Bradley Cairns, PhD
CEO, Huntsman Cancer Institute
Conan Kinsey, MD, PhD
Oncologist, Huntsman Cancer Institute
Assistant Professor in the Departments of Internal Medicine at the University of Utah
Joining a Lab Tour: How Cancer Research Works (00:40)
Heather Simonsen: You're listening to Delivering a Cancer-Free frontier podcast.
Assorted Voices: To create and provide better treatments today. To create and provide better treatments today. I feel like the future is very bright, and I can't even imagine what cancer care is going to look like over the next 50 years. To continue that journey to eradicate cancer from the face of the earth.
Heather Simonsen: Hello and welcome to delivering a cancer free frontier. I'm your host, Heather Simonson.
Conan Kinsey: So welcome to the lab everybody. This is a real honor for me. I love giving lab tours. It's my favorite thing.
Heather Simonsen: This was a tour led by Dr. Conan Kinsey, an MD PhD who works as both a physician and a researcher here at Huntsman Cancer Institute. He's a pancreatic cancer oncologist at Huntsman Cancer Institute and assistant professor of internal medicine at the University of Utah.
Conan Kinsey: And this is one of my favorite environments, too. That's why I did research as well as being a doctor. I believe I'm kind of a lab rat at heart but, I also love taking care of patients, too. So come on in. We're gonna show you around a little bit.
Heather Simonsen: The patients and families who attended were invited as part of a patient connection event hosted by Huntsman Cancer Institute's Gastrointestinal Disease Center. The goal was to give patients with GI cancers and their families the chance to meet one another, hear about the services at Huntsman Cancer Institute, and to learn more about what goes into research. To give you a sense of the scale, Huntsman Cancer Institute has over a mile of bench space—that is space set aside for research. Dr Kinsey's lab is located in an expansive room where row after row of tables are set up for experiments. There's the equipment most of us would probably recognize, like pipettes and microscopes, as well as some more complicated technology. Dr. Kinsey's bench space takes up just a few of these tables next to the others run by his peers and colleagues.
Conan Kinsey: We're all kind of like close together, which is nice, because we discuss things. And that's what makes science really great, is being able to bounce ideas off of other brains, because we all think a little bit differently. So if I say, oh, well, this isn't working, somebody might be, oh, I have experience with that. This is what you should do, and then you try that. And lo and behold, it works.
Heather Simonsen: The tour broke into small groups, Dr. Kinsey alongside his teammates, Miles and Jared explained how lab equipment works—
Conan Kinsey: So, this is a DNA gel. And so, what we do to you to use this as we can actually see fragments of DNA when we run it through this gel...
Heather Simonsen: How cancer experiments are run—
Miles Piper: So, this is our tissue culture room, meaning this is where we get our cancer cells, in our case of pancreatic cancer cells. And we culture them, meaning we grow them in petri dishes, kind of like you see on TV, those stereotypical Petri dishes.
Heather Simonsen: And what cancer cells actually look like up close.
Jared Fowles: But if you scroll out just a little bit, you can kind of appreciate the architecture and the order that's in this type of tissue right different types of cells on the outside. Then there's a ring of different types of cells that look different here, and then all of these cells are lined up nice in different rows. Now, this is some good, some normal tissue. Now I'm going to show you. This is an example of some tumor tissue. Okay, so if you come in here, you'll notice, doesn't quite look the same, does it? It's mayhem. There's no more order, there's no more architecture. It's uncontrolled growth. That's cancer.
Heather Simonsen: Dr. Kinsey and his team are investigating targeted therapies for GI and pancreatic cancers. These are cancer treatments that attack proteins or mutations that contribute to cancer's growth. By hitting those targets at the molecular level, you can stop or slow down cancer spread. But Dr. Kinsey is also interested in why these treatments stop working and what can be done to overcome drug resistance. Labs like this one are a step in a process known as bench to bedside. That means that work done at the laboratory bench directly impacts or translates to new and better treatments for patients. This lab tour helped with another part of the process, one that we care about deeply—translating difficult and hard to understand science in a way that people, especially patients, can understand. So that they can ask questions and better understand how what's happening in the lab will make an impact on the future. Cancer research is the bedrock of progress against one of the world's deadliest diseases. On today's episode, we're discussing how research impacts patients and why it's important to speak up for cancer research in the words of patients and their families.
Samantha Murrell: Hi, I'm Samantha. I have stage four non-small cell lung cancer.
Zach Proctor: In July of 2022 I was diagnosed with osteosarcoma.
Noelle Gatlin: Cancer research is where the seeds of hope and miracles begin. And I believe I'm alive because of a series of miracles.
Ty Burrell: I think they're working to keep families together longer,
Samantha Murrell: Support the research. It matters.
A Conversation with Dr. Bradley Cairns (05:50)
Heather Simonsen: But first, we're going to start by sitting down with Dr. Bradley Cairns, CEO of Huntsman Cancer Institute. Dr. Cairns recently became CEO. He's new to the role, but he's not new to the institute. He's been a research scientist here for almost 30 years.
Heather Simonsen: We want to highlight the importance of cancer research. So, I'll start with the overarching question, why does cancer research matter?
Bradley Cairns: Cancer research matters because it saves lives every day, every single treatment that we have in the clinic now...if you looked at the treatments that we have now, and you went back and looked 30 years ago and said, you know, did we have those same treatments now? The answer would be no to the vast majority. So how did we get from then to here? It's cancer research, discovery research that allows us to find new targets to raise inhibitors and drugs against, then many years of translational research to look at the efficacy of those inhibitors and drug therapies, both in dishes in the clinic and also sometimes experimental models. You have to make sure they work, and then you have to make sure they're safe. And that's where clinical trials really come in. It takes many, many years and many stages of clinical trials to make sure that we are advancing the very best drugs and therapies and that they're safe for our patients. And then once they've gone through that efficacy and safety, they can be widely distributed to patients and become the standard of care that's saving lives today.
Heather Simonsen: And let's talk a little bit about what cancer research looks like here at Huntsman Cancer Institute. What is the goal? How are we different? How does cancer research work at Huntsman Cancer Institute?
Bradley Cairns: Well, Huntsman Cancer Institute is a National Cancer Institute designated Comprehensive Cancer Center. That means we have the highest distinction and the broadest mission. Our goal is to treat all cancers here, to understand their origin, to help identify the best therapies against them, and to utilize our amazing caregivers here to implement those therapies to have absolutely the best outcomes. When we do prevention, we have a great Population Sciences group that is trying to understand, for example, the interaction between genes and the environment, toxins, air quality, so all sorts of ways that genes and the environment can work together to cause cancer. And also, how can areas like the proper nutrition, lifestyle, etc., help either prevent cancers or help during the treatment that people have for the cancers they're experiencing.
Heather Simonsen: Well, and in fact, I was really excited to see just recently, the American Cancer Society released some pretty exciting data. Can you tell us about that?
Bradley Cairns: It's very exciting. It's that 70% of people in the US now survive five years or more after their cancer diagnosis, and this is transformational. It was only 50% in the 1970s, 63% in the mid-1990s and this benchmark of 70% really shows how effective these decades of cancer research have been for survivorship.
Heather Simonsen: Yeah, and when you look at that, I mean the number from the American Cancer Society, 4.8 million cancer deaths prevented. That's remarkable. And what is that attributed to?
Bradley Cairns: Many things. I think one is, I was talking about before, better treatments, which include clinical trials, etc. But cancer prevention, I think, is a major advance that has led to additional lives and also early detection, which is implementing effective cancer screening. And that can be really critical, because early cancers are easier to eliminate, especially before they travel through the body in a process called metastasis, after which they become much harder to contain and kill. So early detection, there is a major weapon that we now have, and there's also behavioral changes. So, we have had declining smoking rates here in the US, and that has contributed to lower cancers overall, and especially lung cancers.
Heather Simonsen: And that also happened in research, right? I mean that that didn't just happen, that the smoking rate declined, right? These are scientists working hard, gathering the data, figuring out, how do we help people overcome a nicotine addiction? Right?
Bradley Cairns: That's right, absolutely. And in fact, we have researchers here that work on how smoking causes lung cancer. That's one aspect. Beyond that, we also have one of the best programs in smoking cessation in the nation. One of our professors, Dave Wetter, is a real leader in smoking cessation programs, and has implemented them, not only here in Utah, but is leading in policy for how smoking cessation can be implemented in Utah and in other states across the nation.
Heather Simonsen: Also, immunotherapy is huge. Can you talk to us about that?
Bradley Cairns: Yeah, immunotherapy has really been a game changer in many types of cancers. It's essentially the use of agents to activate your own immune system to target cancer cells, and this was, I'd say, decades ago, a fringe idea, and it wasn't fully accepted by the scientific community. And therefore, it took decades of research by many across the US and the world to really identify how the immune system can attack a cancer cell and how we can use therapies to get it to activate that process and to target the correct cancer cells and not other cells in your body. So, there's the activation of that killing power, and then it's directing it to the right cells. But incredibly creative and tireless researchers over the last few decades have really worked this process out, and it's really been transformative in areas like multiple myeloma, for example. The five-year survival rate has risen from 32% in the mid-1990s to 62% now. That is, that is, you know, essentially doubling survival from that really terrible disease.
Heather Simonsen: I think it's so important to look at where we are now and to really celebrate that. And I know another big thing to celebrate is targeted therapy is so much better. Is that right?
Bradley Cairns: That's right. There are over 200 different types of cancers. For many of them, if you took a cancer like lung cancer or colon cancer, leukemias, it's not just one type of cancer. There are many, many subtypes of that cancer, and for each what we're finding is that they need a tailored therapy, and that tailored therapy can only be discovered by trying many, many different types of therapies over many years, looking at the outcomes and in an iterative process, then designing and defining what therapies are going to be most effective against that particular cancer subtype. So, this is better known as personalized medicine, and it has been extremely effective at raising survival rates for patients and also for reducing side effects, which is huge. It's absolutely huge. And I'll just give you one, one example in regional lung cancer. For example, survival rates were about 20% in the mid-1990s. But now that researchers understand better those subtypes and how to target them, the survival rates are around 37%, about a doubling of survival rate, which is a huge improvement through cancer research.
Heather Simonsen: It really is transformational. And I mean, I just look at, you know, how far we've come and how far we can go. There's still so much work to do. You mentioned, there's 200 types of cancer, and for many of them, there is no good treatment or cure. So really, we got to keep at it.
Bradley Cairns: We definitely have to keep at it. That's right. Of those, it's a big spectrum of those 200 types of cancers out there. For some, we've made tremendous progress and have very high cure rates. For others, we're improving, and I just gave a couple of examples of where treatments are now really advancing rapidly to improve cure rates and to add years. There are others that are really, really stubborn, like pancreatic cancer and ovarian cancer. Have advances been made? Yes, they have, but we have so far to go on those and many others. So continued investment in cancer research is needed to make progress on those cancers, and our tools are getting better and better and better. So, investments now, I think we'll get a greater return on investment using all types of technologies, including AI, types of approaches that are going to make our search for new types of compounds and inhibitors much more efficient and effective, and matching patients to those right new trials better. More efficient, more effective, leading to better outcomes.
Heather Simonsen: And I know that a lot of people don't connect the dots. They don't understand, okay, my treatment, my prevention, my cure, happened in the lab, first years and years of research in the lab. Why do you think there's that disconnect?
Bradley Cairns: You've already pointed out the problem. When people go to get their cancer treatment, they're often not told what was the original origin of the treatment that I'm receiving. It gets lost in the history. It becomes what people call standard of care, but there's no conveyance of the path the history, the discovery process of bringing that incredibly effective treatment to them. It often started with someone having a creative idea about how that cancer may have originated, doing basic work in a basic science laboratory to understand what's the difference between a cancer cell and a normal cell, progressing that research forward to an idea of a genetic mutation or an enzyme or a protein that may be dysregulated in that cancer, a decade of work on understanding how to inhibit that particular protein that derives from that mutation that causes cancer. If you go back and do the historical analysis of an effective treatment, it often has a decades long story that it can't tell, right? And that's also our responsibility in cancer centers to help get that story out. I'm so glad you asked me that question, so as part of this podcast, we can get that story out of how much hard work over decades goes into developing these really effective therapies. And we're not done. And until we get to that 100% we're going to give it 100% until we get there.
Heather Simonsen: Dr. Bradley Cairns, what a pleasure and true honor it has been having you on the podcast this morning.
Bradley Cairns: Thank you. It's really been my pleasure. And thank you to everybody listening. And thank you for your support of cancer research. It's greatly appreciated.
Our Community Speaks Up for Cancer Research (18:00)
Heather Simonsen: We've invited a few patients and their families to share firsthand how cancer research is impacting their lives. Over the past year, these videos were shared on our social media pages, and we wanted to share them with you too.
Zach Proctor: My name is Zach Proctor. I'm a painter. In July of 2022, I was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, a rare bone cancer. Through treatment and the staff at Huntsman Cancer Institute, I was given another chance. When my cancer came back this year, I was looking at another six rounds of chemo. Before I started, I painted these two portraits of my kids because they're my reason why. When I went up to Huntsman for weeklong treatments, I would take one of these portraits and hang it in the room to remind me of that reason. Please join me and millions of other cancer patients in advocating for cancer research so we can do better for our kids.
Noelle Gatlin: Hello. My name is Noelle Gatlin. I'm a wife, a mom, a special education teacher, and I am a pancreatic adenocarcinoma survivor. I've been a survivor for two and a half years now, and I attribute a lot of this to amazing cancer research that took place more than 12 years before I was diagnosed in August of 2022. I was treated with a chemotherapy drug called folfirinox, which became the standard of care for pancreatic cancer patients in 2010. Cancer research is where the seeds of hope and miracles begin, and I believe I'm alive because of a series of miracles. It's more than just what happens in a lab. It's more than just a researcher standing over Petri dishes. Cancer research gives families time. When I was diagnosed with cancer, my youngest son was only 10, and he's 13 now, and I get to enjoy all the delights of having another teenager in my home and having time with my family is a gift. Cancer research gives families time together.
Ty Burrell: Hey, everyone, Ty Burrell here. I lost my father to cancer when I was relatively young. I was 20 before I had even started acting. You can imagine that it's had a huge impact on my life and has weighed heavily on me. I feel so fortunate to live in an area, Utah, that has a place like the Huntsman Cancer Institute. The research they're doing is incredible, and I view it in the most practical terms, which is to say that I think they're working to keep families together longer. So, I really encourage you to support them as well, and I also encourage you to share your stories here as well.
Samantha Murrell: Hi, I'm Samantha. I have stage four non-small cell lung cancer with a HER2 mutation. Cancer has changed my life in so many ways, but research has given me hope. The drug that I am currently on for my HER2 mutation was only FDA-approved two years ago, and it is giving me more time. I believe in the power of science to save lives. That's why I support the work being done at the Huntsman Cancer Institute. Their research is helping us understand cancer better treat it more effectively and move closer to a future without it. If you believe in a future free from cancer, join me. Share your story, support the research. It matters.
Heather Simonsen: The last voice you heard was Samantha Murrell, and we wanted to tell you more about her. She's an avid hiker and world traveler who has lived all over the US after growing up in England after her cancer diagnosis a few years ago, she's become a passionate advocate for cancer research.
Samantha's Story (21:57)
Samantha Murrell: To be told at 37 years old that you have stage 4 lung cancer was the shock of my life. That’s quite the understatement. My name is Samantha Murrell. I’m here to discuss research when it comes to cancer, and my stage 4 lung cancer diagnosis. And my journey.
So, I was diagnosed in April of 2024. I developed a cough while I was on a trip to India. A lot of other people developed the same cough, so I didn't think anything of it. But my cough got worse, and I had some chest pressure that was getting worse and worse. And I'm a very healthy and athletic person, and so me getting off the couch and being out of breath was quite jarring for me. So, I ended up going to the urgent care and they did a chest X ray, and they found that I had an entire lung full of fluid, which initiated an ER visit immediately and throughout the course of five days, they did a bunch of tests, scans, and they came to the conclusion at the end of the five days that I had cancer of some sort. We were waiting on biopsy results, and a few days after that, came back with results that I had non-small cell adenocarcinoma of the lung, and it was stage four because it spread to other parts of my body. I thought that lung cancer was one of the cancers I could not get because I didn't smoke or vape, and so I really thought I was immune to this cancer.
The next steps after being diagnosed was to meet with an oncologist. I asked him point blank, how long he might think that I have left to live, and he told me nine months, which was quite shocking. I was in a very small town in Montana. And from that point on, we decided that we wanted to go to a bigger hospital that had a specific thoracic unit that could really specialize in the cancer that I had. And so, seeing as my husband was from Utah, the default was to look at the Huntsman. We relocated back to Utah, and within a week, I was seeing my thoracic oncologist for the first time and talking about next steps.
My thoracic oncologist in the beginning was Dr. Akerley. He's now since retired, but he was a fantastic oncologist. And he decided that I should get something called biomarker testing, which is very commonly done in lung cancer. And it's essentially to look for mutations that I might have that could be targeted by treatment that is especially designed for those mutations. So, my testing revealed that I had a mutation called ERBB2. It's more commonly referred to as HER2. And some folks might know that in more commonly known in breast cancer as HER2 positive breast cancer. It is in two to 4% of lung cancers. So, it is extremely rare, and I was honestly expecting one of the other mutations that were far more common and had a lot of treatment options. And so, to be told I had this one, further dampened my spirits a little bit, because at the time, I did not know how many options were out there for this mutation.
My first line of treatment was traditional chemo and immunotherapy, because there was no first line therapy for my specific mutation at the time. And so, I was on that those therapies for six months. And at the six-month mark they stopped working for me. I had liver metastasis growth, so all of the tumors in my liver started to grow again, which was a sign that the treatment wasn't being as effective as it was before. So, it was time to switch it up.
So, my second line of treatment was an ADC, which is stands for an antibody drug conjugate. It is becoming more and more common in many different types of cancers, and this one in particular, targeted my HER2 mutation. And it was FDA-approved for lung cancer, specifically, only two years ago. There was a lot of nervousness around starting this drug and the effects that it might have on my cancer. And so when I initially got the first results, I remember going for a hike, and my husband got the results on MyChart as we were hiking, and he told me how much my liver mets had shrunk, and I just fell to the ground, balling, because I was like, wow, this this means I'm going to be around for a little bit longer.
The anxiety around waiting for a scan is high for anyone but especially trying to find out if a new treatment is working for you or not, is the most anxiety ridden period of time that I can ever explain to you. Nothing will distract you. It just consumes you completely. And so having that sense of relief that this new drug is doing some magical things in my body was really an incredible feeling.
I was very fortunate that this drug had been approved two years prior. You know, there had obviously been clinical trials before that, so people could get on this drug earlier than FDA approval. But if that drug had not been available to me, I would effectively have been in the actively dying process, because after traditional chemo and immunotherapy, barring clinical trials that might have been available to me, I would have been out of options.
So, because I wanted to do surgery, the ADC treatment that I was on is pretty toxic. And so, I would have had to have had quite a large break in treatment if I was going to have surgery. And so, there was a new drug again, thanks to research that was approved just two months prior to my surgery that is called a TKI, which essentially is a pill that also targets my HER2 mutation cancer. And so, I started that pill a couple of weeks before my surgery, and I have continued to stay on that. Just because the side effects are very minimal, it means I don't need any infusions every three weeks, and I can go back to just living my life. And so, I'm going to stay that on that drug for quite a while.
So right now, I feel great. The TKI that I'm on definitely makes me feel tired. So, I am tired, but I'm working full time, still in a job that I absolutely love. I'm traveling the world, and so I'm very much living my life, enjoying time with friends and family, and I very much can pretend right now that I don't have cancer, which is really nice feeling to have, and a nice break from that emotional roller coaster that I went through.
So I talk about cancer research a lot because essentially, I wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for cancer research. You know, people that are diagnosed at stage four or go to stage four essentially think that they have a death sentence, and it is heartbreaking to know that we're being told that you have a X amount of months or years to live, and research could very much turn that completely around. We just don't know what is on the horizon. I feel like we're on the cusp of some massive developments. And so, I speak up about the need for funding for research, because funding is going away, and it needs to be the complete opposite. We need to move the space forward and have these developments so that people like myself can live longer. And so, I will speak about this all day long if you want me to.
Heather Simonsen: Thank you to Dr. Bradley Cairns and Samantha Murell for joining us today. Thanks to Dr. Conan Kinsey, Miles Piper, and Jared Fowles for letting us tag along on the tour of their lab. And thank you to all our patients and supporters who have contributed videos to our Speak Up for Cancer Research campaign. To our dedicated listeners, we are so thankful for your support. For additional resources, be sure to check out our show notes. And if you want to stay connected with us and be the first to know about upcoming episodes, subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. Please log on to Apple Podcasts and leave us a five-star review. This helps other people like you find this podcast. If you have questions, comments, suggestions for future episodes or a personal story you'd like to share, please visit our website, huntsmancancer.org. This episode is produced by Nina Earnest. Theme music composed by Mix at Six studios. Additional music from Warner Chappell Production Music. I'm your host, Heather Simonson. A special thanks to the Huntsman Cancer Institute Communications and Public Affairs Team.