Eoganacht wrote: New Rapid City clinic puts generic drugs to use to help fight cancer
A new clinic in downtown Rapid City offers a supplemental care option for those who have received that most dreaded of diagnoses: cancer.
Care Oncology Clinic, 910 Main St., Suite 120, is one of two such clinics worldwide offering trial treatments involving a cocktail mix of existing medications originally approved to treat other maladies, according to Travis Christofferson of Rapid City, CEO of Care Oncology’s U.S. Division.
“What Care Oncology is doing is filling this unmet need to try to realize the efficacy of these drugs,” he said.
Christofferson is a 1990 graduate of Rapid City Stevens High School. He earned his undergraduate degree in microbiology from Montana State University and his master’s in Material Engineering and Science from the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology.
After earning his undergraduate degree, he was accepted to attend the Sanford School of Medicine at the University of South Dakota, but at the last minute, he decided not to seek a medical degree.
“I realized I liked the scientific part of medicine more than the clinical part of medicine,” he said.
Christofferson took an independent study class on cancer while at Mines and that eventually led to his 2014 book “Tripping over the Truth. The Metabolic Theory of Cancer,” relating the development of a theory of how a cell’s flawed absorption of blood sugars, or metabolism, may lead to the growth and spread of cancer.
While on a lecture tour in London about a year and a half ago, he met research oncologists with London-based Care Oncology Clinic, which for the last four years had been researching the effects of “off-target” medications — drugs already approved to treat a particular condition but found to have potential for treating other diseases.
Care Oncology doctors there expressed a desire to expand to the United States.
“We struck up a collaboration because we’re aligned scientifically to what they’re doing," Christofferson said. "So I convinced them to start small and expand right here in Rapid City, because I’m obviously from here and we could work out the logistics from here."
Christofferson said there are thousands of so-called “off-target” drugs which wind up shelved, or “stranded,” once a separate beneficial effect is noted.
Pharmaceutical companies consider the off-target, off-patent generic drugs unworthy of the investment needed for new testing and recertification in treating other diseases.
“Doctors call them financial orphans," Christofferson said. "These drugs sit there and languish. We know they have use, but they’ve never realized their potential."
Care Oncology Clinic’s doctors and researchers sifted through data from thousands of generic drugs looking for indicators of anti-cancer effect and developed a combo of four drugs with the best potential of augmenting cancer care.
Their medicinal cocktail includes a proprietary mix of Glucophage (Metformin), a first-line treatment for Type 2 diabetes, Statins for treatment of high cholesterol, Mebendazole, an antifungal, and Doxycycline, an antibiotic.
The research is incomplete, but all have shown promise, in different ways, in interrupting the supply of nutrients to cancer cells, he said.
New medications must undergo years of clinical trials before being approved for use, and even then, their effectiveness and potential for toxicity and side effects may not be entirely known for years. The off-target drugs are already well-known and familiar.
“The advantage of these drugs is that they’ve been in the clinic for decades. We know the toxicology and side effects,” he said.
The clinic charges a fee for its treatments, which are currently outside of insurance coverage, he said.
Christofferson is regularly meeting with Regional Health Pharmacists and Oncologists. “We’re hoping to get a closer relationship (with Regional),” he said.
Christofferson emphasized that Care Oncology’s regimen is not a replacement for other standard of care treatments, rather it is meant to supplement other cancer therapies, surgery, radiation and chemotherapy.
“Our goal is to make standard of care work better. We can’t say if it works better until we have all the data,” he said.