Bloodless War on Cancer:

Dr. David Waisman seeks to cut off tumour blood supply and prevent metastases

The secret to stopping cancer may lie in blocking its blood supply. That’s why Dr. David Waisman – a Tier I Canada Research Chair in Cancer Research – is working with ‘angiostatin,’ a substance found naturally in our bodies which helps prevent tumours from developing a blood supply.

“Tumours need the nutrients in blood to grow… so they both recruit and tap into nearby blood vessels, and can even sprout blood vessels of their own,” says Dr. Waisman of the complex process known as angiogenesis. “This also allows the tumour to release cancer cells into the bloodstream, to invade nearby tissues and spread around the body. Once they’ve moved to new locations in the body, the metastasized cancer cells develop their own blood supply and begin another cycle of growth, invasion and metastasis. ”

To prevent this deadly chain of events, Dr. Waisman and his research team are engineering angiostatin into a powerful anti-angiogenesis weapon. “We’re adding cell-killing toxins to the angiostatin to create a biological therapy that will destroy the blood supply to the primary tumour. This will starve the tumour to death, while preventing metastasized cells from recruiting a blood supply – curing the cancer without toxic side effects.”

Dr. Waisman is also studying a protein called p11, which seems to help cancer cells bore through blood vessel walls to get into the bloodstream. “In healthy situations, p11 helps regulate blood clotting… in cancer, it plays a key role in tumour growth, invasion and metastases,” he says. “We’ve found that knocking down p11 production prevents cancer cells from developing into sizeable tumours.”

One of Canada's foremost experts in angiogenesis and metastases, Dr. Waisman left the University of Calgary to join Dalhousie Medical School as professor in the Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology in 2006.