Hollings Annual Report 2023 FINAL - Flipbook - Page 11
E-cigarettes
Young adults are now more likely to vape than to use
traditional cigarettes. After years of public health success
in decreasing the number of people using cigarettes,
researchers are seeing striking increases in the number of
young people who use e-cigarettes regularly — so much so
that, for the first time, there are more young people who
begin to use nicotine through vaping rather than through
cigarettes.
Drug resistance
Researchers at MUSC Hollings Cancer Center believe
that some drugs already approved by the U.S. Food and
Drug Administration or currently in clinical trials could be
repurposed for certain breast cancer patients whose cancer
has become resistant to standard therapies.
“We now have a shift such that there are more ‘never
smokers’ who vape than established smokers,” said MUSC
Hollings Cancer Center researcher Benjamin Toll, Ph.D.,
director of the MUSC Health Tobacco Treatment Program.
“That is a massive shift in the landscape of tobacco. These
‘never smokers’ are unlikely to start smoking combustible
cigarettes — they’re likely to vape and keep vaping. And it’s
this group, ages 18 to 24, who are going to forecast future
e-cigarette users.”
That forecast is a mixed bag. It’s certainly encouraging to
see the lowest recorded level of young adults who report
smoking. But while Toll and other tobacco researchers at
Hollings believe that e-cigarettes could be a less harmful
option for people who want to quit smoking but haven’t
been able to, they emphasize that it is not a harm-free
option — and because of that, it’s disheartening to see
young adults with no history of smoking begin to vape.
Ozgur Sahin, Ph.D., a professor and SmartState Endowed
Chair in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular
Biology, led research, published in Nature Communications,
into cancer resistance to the drug tamoxifen and other
hormone therapies and CDK4/6 inhibitors. CDK4/6
inhibitors are targeted therapies that stop cancer cells from
multiplying.
The result is a new explanation of why certain widely
used therapies work — and by better understanding how
these common therapies are functioning, researchers can
formulate new therapies to respond when they stop working.
Pancreatic cancer
The team used national longitudinal data and found that
a majority of young adults who vape, 56%, have never
regularly smoked cigarettes. They also found that, though
young men vape more than young women, there was a
larger increase among young women. The findings were
reported in a research letter in JAMA Internal Medicine.
Celebrating 30 Years
In findings reported in Cancer Biomarkers, Nancy KlauberDeMore, M.D., showed that secreted frizzled-related
protein 2, or SFRP2, which is involved in tumor growth and
angiogenesis — the growth of new blood vessels to feed
the tumor — is especially abundant in pancreatic cancer. In
addition, the more that it shows up, the worse outcome the
patient is likely to have.
However, the fact that so much SFRP2 is concentrated in
the tumor, with very little in the surrounding normal tissue,
also makes it a potential therapeutic target, KlauberDeMore said.
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