![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.bigtencrc.org\/site\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/Deming-1797-200x300.jpg\")
Imagine having surgery to remove a tumor, and by the time you\u2019ve recovered from the operation, your oncologist has determined a specific drug regimen that is targeted to treat your cancer.<\/p>\nImagine having surgery to remove a tumor, and by the time you\u2019ve recovered from the operation, your oncologist has determined a specific drug regimen that is targeted to treat your cancer.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you get diagnosed with a bacterial infection, we take a culture, grow the bacteria in the lab, and treat the cultures with antibiotics,\u201d said\u00a0Dustin Deming, MD<\/a>, a gastrointestinal oncologist and researcher with the\u00a0UW Carbone Cancer Center<\/a>. \u201cThis helps us learn what antibiotic will best treat an infection. Why can\u2019t we do the same thing for cancer?\u201d<\/p>\n Shifting \u201ctrial and error\u201d treatment approaches from patients to cell cultures could spare patients time and unnecessary side effects while providing a personalized form of treatment.<\/p>\n The challenge to this approach has traditionally been the difficulty of growing cancer cells in the lab, but research in Deming\u2019s lab, which focuses on gastrointestinal cancers, is overcoming this limitation.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cIf you take cancer cells and put them on a plastic dish, only 10% of those cells will grow, but we\u2019ve developed a technique where we lock cancer cells in a gel-like substance where we can provide them with all the different nutrients and growth factors they need to grow,\u201d Deming said. \u201cBy doing this, we can grow cells from 70-90% of cancers.\u201d<\/p>\n Now that they can grow and maintain cancer cells at high success rates, Deming and his research team are studying if drugs that are effective at killing patients\u2019 cancer cells in the lab will work to treat individual patients in the clinic.<\/p>\n This research, funded in part by\u00a0Garding Against Cancer<\/a>, is an offshoot of the\u00a0Precision Medicine Molecular Tumor Board<\/a>\u00a0(PMMTB), which was launched in 2015 by Deming and\u00a0Mark Burkhard, MD, PhD<\/a>, an oncologist and researcher at UW Carbone. The PMMTB is supported by the UW Collaborative Genomics Core, the UW Carbone Cancer Center, and nearly $500,000 in annual state funding.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Imagine having surgery to remove a tumor, and by the time you\u2019ve recovered from the operation, your oncologist has determined a specific drug regimen that is targeted to treat your cancer. \u201cIf you get diagnosed …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[125],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wwwtest.cancer.wisc.edu\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11618"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wwwtest.cancer.wisc.edu\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wwwtest.cancer.wisc.edu\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wwwtest.cancer.wisc.edu\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wwwtest.cancer.wisc.edu\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11618"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wwwtest.cancer.wisc.edu\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11618\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11619,"href":"https:\/\/wwwtest.cancer.wisc.edu\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11618\/revisions\/11619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wwwtest.cancer.wisc.edu\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wwwtest.cancer.wisc.edu\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wwwtest.cancer.wisc.edu\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}