- Caroline Heckman and her team test drugs developed by companies on patients' own cancer cells.
- The idea is to identify the most promising treatments and the patients who would benefit from them.
- The HiLIFE research facilities and collaboration with doctors provide a good platform for innovation.
How can we bring hope to patients who are not helped by conventional treatments? This is the question driving Caroline Heckman, Research Director at the HiLIFE Institute at the University of Helsinki. A blood cancer patient's poor response to treatment can be due to many factors, such as drug resistance or heredity. But precision medicine may offer solutions, which is why Heckman has joined forces with international pharmaceutical companies.
“By working together, I think we can move drug development forward faster.”
Since 2010, Heckman’s research team has been studying two blood diseases. The first is acute myeloid leukaemia (AML), an aggressive blood cancer that occurs in adults and children. The second is an incurable cancer called multiple myeloma, which primarily affects elderly people.
When we started our work more than ten years ago, it was not standard practice to take cancer cells from a patient and screen them against hundreds of different drugs to identify those that would be most effective.
The team and their collaborators were among the first to take up a pioneering approach. They have tested hundreds of drugs on cancer cells taken from patients' blood and bone marrow samples, as well as mapped genetic mutations in the cells. By combining this data, they can predict how different patients will respond to treatments.
“When we started the project, this approach was very advanced. We gained a lot of attention from pharmaceutical companies that often struggle with poor responses to the drugs in their clinical trials,” says Heckman.
Caroline Heckman completed her doctorate in Texas at one of the world's largest centres for cancer research and continued her career at Stanford University. She joined the Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland, which is part of HiLIFE, in 2010.
Soon after, she found her first major corporate partner – Celgene, an American company developing drugs for multiple myeloma. The company wanted to find out which drugs would be worth taking to clinical trials and what kind of patients they could help.
Heckman and her colleagues set out to solve this question. They analysed patient samples they received from Professor Kimmo Porkka’s team at HUS using next-generation sequencing and high throughput screening. The use of advanced research methods was possible thanks to corporate funding.
“We were able to do work that was incredibly expensive at the time,” Heckman recalls.
Later, Heckman and Celgene's collaboration expanded to other diseases and continued until 2019. The drugs that sprouted from the projects are still being developed and have been tested in clinical trials on patients at the HUS Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Heckman thinks her team helped the company to identify the most promising drugs quickly and thus save money. By doing this, unnecessary treatments were also avoided.
“The company was able to screen patients and predict which ones would respond well to a drug.”
Heckman has continued to search for new blood cancer treatments. In recent years, she has joined forces with companies from Switzerland, Sweden and the United States. Heckman believes that the easiest way to attract the interest of the pharmaceutical industry is to raise the visibility of one’s own work.
“You have to be active and attend international conferences to make these connections.”
Business partners can benefit from HiLIFE’s networks: collaboration with HUS enables testing of treatments on cancer cells from patients, and iCAN, a flagship in cancer research navigated by the University of Helsinki, offers a glimpse into the latest advances in personalised medicine. HiLIFE’s state-of-the-art research equipment, for its part, will help with tasks such as mapping the sensitivity of cancer patients to different drugs.
“The Institute and my colleagues there have provided excellent support for the projects,” says Heckman.
Heckman was awarded a prize for her successful corporate collaboration already back in 2017. Currently, her team and colleagues at HUS have fresh research results that she hopes will attract the interest of pharmaceutical companies. These could be used to try to bring new treatments to AML patients who, because of a particular genetic change, are at high risk of a cancer recurrence or of the drugs not working.
“We would like to find companies that would be interested in collaborating in developing such treatments,” Heckman says.
Contact us and we will design a project according to your individual needs: business@helsinki.fi