Ferrer advances new pediatric cancer treatments

PHOTOs | Contributed Dr. Fernando Ferrer

Dr. Fernando Ferrer and his team are researching new targeted drug treatments to treat cancer more successfully with less harm to patients. He and a handful of fellow researchers are working on drug combinations that target cell pathways favored by cancer, working to interrupt the signaling that cancer cells use for movement and blood-vessel generation.

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By John Stearns

Dr. Fernando Ferrer, chief physician executive and surgeon-in-chief at Connecticut Children's Medical Center, said there's something that seems very wrong seeing children with cancer — and he's driven to do more to help.

In addition to running a busy practice, Ferrer is researching new targeted drug treatments to treat cancer more successfully with less harm to patients. He and a handful of fellow researchers are working on drug combinations that target cell pathways favored by cancer, working to interrupt the signaling that cancer cells use for movement and blood-vessel generation. Working with pharmaceutical companies, they're trying to design new drugs for what's known as the S1P pathway to slow down or stop cancer growth in pediatric solid tumors.

“Cancers have an ability to adapt, so if the cancer's using hallway A to conduct its business or its cell signaling, and you interfere with hallway A, it'll move to hallway B or hallway C. But if you interfere with hallway A, B and C simultaneously by using different drugs in combination, then you have a chance to push the cancer cell into what we call a cell-death mode,” Ferrer said. “The pendulum switches and the cell dies.”

He and his colleagues are looking at what he calls a novel pathway that's important for cancer-cell survival and progression and working with pharma to develop new drugs that target that pathway that they hope, in combination with therapy, will be more effective on kids' cancer and less toxic for patients.

The combination therapy — the combining of already approved cancer drugs with new ones under development — is showing promise in preclinical trials. He hopes the work can move into clinical trials in the next few years.

“This is what you dream about when you go to medical school and you become a surgeon … and you're treating and operating on children with cancer and you feel like, 'Holy cow, what we're doing is not good enough, we're not solving the problem,' ” Ferrer said. “You start to think, 'Let's try to find different ways.' It's terribly exciting and a real privilege to actually get to do this work. I wake up every morning and I feel pretty excited about my day.”

Ferrer, who came to CCMC in 2001 after completing training in pediatric urologic surgery and research at Johns Hopkins Hospital, also is a professor of surgery, pediatrics and cell biology at UConn's medical school. While he directs the research at his lab at the Center of Vascular Biology at UConn Health, he said his collaborators are key to the work: Timothy Hla, director of the Center for Vascular Biology at the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York; Meihong Li, a research associate at the UConn Health lab; and Linda Shapiro, director of the Center for Vascular Biology at UConn Health.

“It takes a team. It's not a one-man operation,” Ferrer said.

Shapiro credited Ferrer's hard work in maintaining a thriving practice at CCMC and spending two days a week on research.

“He's incredibly passionate and dedicated to his research,” Shapiro said. “I do research full-time and it's a lot of work. He has another career on top of that, and just the ability to do both jobs — and do them well — is pretty impressive.”

The team, with help from The Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine, also is doing genomics work to see which specific pathways the combinations of drugs are altering so they can determine the best pathways to target, Shapiro said.

Ferrer said the research is novel, too, since it's driving towards developing a new drug. “It's not observation for observation's sake,” he said. “It's all very goal-driven, which is finding another useful agent to use in pediatric cancer.”

It's a privilege to care for people's children, he said.

“But you also feel very driven to try to change the trajectory of some of these diseases that kill children because these kids are the future and quite frankly I see my children in every child I treat. That certainly becomes an incredible driver for you and an incredible motivator to try to push the field forward,” he said.

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