When finding new drugs to fight cancer, sometimes the answer is to use an old drug for a new purpose. Finding new uses for old drugs is the goal of Hua Xu, Director of the Center for Computational Biomedicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.
Xu came to UTHealth in 2012 from Vanderbilt University with the help of a Recruitment of Rising Star Award from CPRIT.
He has developed software to comb through electronic medical records, including narrative data. Xu is looking for associations between cancer survival and drugs that weren’t necessarily prescribed to fight cancer in the first place, like the diabetes drug metformin.
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When finding new drugs to fight cancer, sometimes the answer is to use an old drug for a new purpose. Finding new uses for old drugs is the goal of Hua Xu, Director of the Center for Computational Biomedicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.
Xu came to UTHealth in 2012 from Vanderbilt University with the help of a Recruitment of Rising Star Award from CPRIT.
He has developed software to comb through electronic medical records, including narrative data. Xu is looking for associations between cancer survival and drugs that weren’t necessarily prescribed to fight cancer in the first place, like the diabetes drug metformin.
Several years ago, doctors noticed that patients taking metformin for Type II diabetes seemed to have a better chance of surviving cancer than people not taking the drug.
To find out if this was really true, Xu used computers to look through a database of 40,000 electronic medical records at Vanderbilt. Indeed, he found that people who took metformin to control their diabetes did better at fighting cancer than diabetes patients taking other drugs or cancer patients without diabetes. He looked through nearly 80,000 additional records in a different database and found the same thing.
This data mining is a lot less expensive than the usual drug discovery process—which can take 10-17 years and cost $800 million. Metformin is already well understood and approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Now it has the chance to be repurposed to help fight cancer and improve a patient’s odds of survival.
Xu hopes to use his tools to find other drugs that could help people fight cancer. Using software to sort through electronic medical records of nearly 150,000 people, Xu examined how 149 drugs used to treat chronic conditions affected survival from cancer. He found nine non-cancer drugs that improved the survival of cancer patients.
The natural-language processing software tools, called “CLAMP, ” that Xu has developed at UTHealth are being used all over the U.S., by 150 users at 50 different institutions, including MD Anderson Cancer Center.
In 2016, Xu received a 5-year grant for $3 million from the National Cancer Institute to extend his research.
The School of Biomedical Informatics at UTHealth is the only academic program of its kind in Texas and the only freestanding school of biomedical informatics in the U.S. The school comprises 10 faculty members working on developing new methodologies and new applications in biomedical informatics.
Xu studied biochemistry at Nanjing University in China before coming to the U.S. for a master’s degree in computer science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. in biomedical informatics at Columbia University before joining the faculty at Vanderbilt University as an assistant professor in 2008.
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