Grant Issued to Evaluate Effectiveness of Baking Soda for Breast Cancer Therapy

A USD 2 million grant will enable biomedical engineering researchers to improve the way clinicians assess the effectiveness of drinking baking soda used to treat breast cancer.

The grant, issued by the US National Institutes of Health (Bethesda, MD, USA), will enable University of Arizona (Tucson, USA) researchers to help refine a new magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) method for measuring pH of a tumor that has been discovered in a patient but not yet treated. By measuring the acid content of the tumor, clinicians can monitor the effectiveness of personalized treatments such as baking soda on both tumors and healthy tissue, and even predict the effectiveness of chemotherapies before the patient begins the medication.

Drinking baking soda has been shown to reduce or eliminate the spread of breast cancer to the lungs, brain and bone, but too much baking soda can also damage normal organs. “In other words, this test is designed to lead to personalized medicine for cancer patients, by optimizing the therapy to each individual,” said Dr. Mark Pagel, associate professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Arizona and lead researcher on the project.

Just as people feel the burn from lactic acid produced in their muscles during rigorous exercise, tumors also produce lactic acid when they are actively growing, according to Dr. Pagel. This acid destroys surrounding tissue, which allows the tumor to grow, invade surrounding areas, and metastasize to other organs in the body. “The acid also provides resistance to common chemotherapies,” Dr. Pagel remarked.

“Measuring the pH in a tumor is essential, because some drugs only work at the right pH,” said Dr. Jennifer Barton, professor and head of UA biomedical engineering. “Patients can actually change their body’s pH to make their cancer drugs more effective--it can be as simple as drinking baking soda--but this process has to be carefully monitored.”

The aim of the research is to prove that this unique and innovative MRI tumor measurement technique will help improve, and in some cases save, the lives of women with breast cancer. The study is being conducted in collaboration with Dr. Ian Robey, assistant professor of research at The University of Arizona Cancer Center, and clinical collaborators Drs. Alison Stopeck, Setsuko Chambers, and Phil Kuo, who are refining the new approach to give physicians the ability to diagnose directly the acid content in tumors of cancer patients at the clinic level.

“This is a tool that is currently available to very few scientists across America,” Dr. Pagel said. “So we have recently collaborated with the Barrow Neurological Institute and other sites in Phoenix [AZ, USA] to implement our methods in their research centers. These collaborations demonstrate that this method can assist in the individual, personal treatment of breast cancer patients around the world.”

Dr. Pagel noted that another unique aspect of this research is the discovery that a chemical agent already approved for clinical X-ray imaging can also be utilized for MRI studies, allowing clinical trials to begin without approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

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