BRAF Inhibitor Resistance and other things I’m learning

Because of my diagnosis of melanoma late last year, I find myself reading information about the disease. Sometimes, I stumble across information I had no idea even existed. Today, I came across an article that highlighted the efforts of researchers at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. Since I live in Texas, I’m always interested in what the local kids are up to these days.

The article (which can be found in its entirety here) talks about how melanoma patients with a particular gene mutation will become resistant to BRAF-inhibiting drugs. For someone who hasn’t reached the stage where anything more than wait and see what pops up next is required, this is a new world to me. BRAF proteins spur the development of melanoma cancer cells in the body, a piece of information I hadn’t known until now.

Immediately I started googling BRAF proteins. Lots of what I came across was very scientific and dense with terms like “downstream signaling of the MAP kinase pathway”. But basically, these proteins are found in melanoma that has spread to other parts of the body in some cases. The drugs used to turn off, or inhibit, BRAF proteins seem to only work for about a year for a third of the patients before DNA mutations in the body decrease the effectiveness of the drugs. Scientists do not yet know and understand what the mutation is, despite DNA sequencing studies.

The researchers at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center instead looked at 150 different proteins and the patterns of changes to see if they could find clues on what cause protein resistance instead of relying on the DNA sequencing. This is some in-depth research that could show why not only BRAF proteins develop resistance, but why other protein involved diseases stop responding to treatment.

The upshot of this is that melanoma which is BRAF-involved and has evolved into drug-resistance is a mystery that may end up being solved. And if there is a reason that BRAF protein inhibitors get “turned off” by the body, maybe someday in the future researchers can find a way to “turn back on” methods to inhibit BRAF proteins in melanoma patients.

I don’t mention my job in this blog because it doesn’t seem relevant most of the time; but I work for a company that is a platform for Big Data. It’s super techy stuff and I love the potential of what our data platform might be able to do for areas like scientific research. Studying how to find out what exactly is the mechanism for the DNA mutation to BRAF inhibitor drugs is one of those types of problems that my company’s mission targets. I don’t know if the MD Anderson Cancer Center researchers used my company’s data platform during their research; but it’s kind of cool to think that maybe someday in the future, scientists working on problems like this will use our product (or even something similar) to use all this data and try to find patterns and solve problems – maybe even help cure a disease or at least give more quality time to someone in advanced stages.