Wake Forest Baptist Gets Large Grant To Increase Cancer Research

Wake Forest Baptist Health has received a multi-million dollar grant to expand its cancer research. It will focus on how cancer treatments can affect the heart and the brain, among other things.

The six-year, $25 million award from the National Cancer Institute's Community Oncology Research Program (NCORP) will build on work from a previous grant received in 2014.

Wake Forest Baptist says it will look at how different therapies, such as radiation and chemotherapy, can affect the quality of life for patients and their caregivers dealing with the disease.

For example, doctors know that certain classes of chemotherapy drugs commonly given for breast cancer and lymphomas can cause a permanent decrease in heart function. Researchers are looking at ways to protect the heart from damage, as well as clearly defining who may be at risk so that doctors can intervene to prevent or stop the damage.

In addition, the research team is studying the following areas:

• Evaluating how treatments in adolescent and young adult cancer survivors can affect their long-term ability to work.
• Using an internet-based approach to provide rural cancer survivors with counseling for depression. 
• Using statins, a common class of drugs, to potentially protect the heart from chemotherapy-induced toxicity. 
• Training patient navigators to improve care for African-American patients with early-stage lung cancer, who historically have had poor outcomes. 
• Testing and designing an effective smoking-cessation intervention for high-risk patients being screened for lung cancer. A study is underway to compare 12 sites that are doing cessation interventions during the screening process with 12 sites that don't offer smoking cessation as part of their screenings. 

Researchers say they plan to share the results of their work on cancer care with community-based practices.

“So much of physician interaction focuses on active treatment yet every minute of every day, even when therapy has been completed or paused, patients and providers, caregivers and their families deal with the effects of the cancer treatment,” says Glenn Lesser, M.D., one of the principal investigators of the project. “We are trying to bring some balance back to their lives by focusing on improving quality of life no matter where they are on the cancer journey.” 

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