Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

URMC gets millions in federal funds to reduce cancer treatment side effects

Karen Mustian, one of the principal investigators on a federally funded research team, speaks at the announcement of a $29 million grant on Monday.
Brett Dahlberg
/
WXXI News
Karen Mustian, one of the principal investigators on a federally funded research team, speaks at the announcement of a $29 million grant on Monday.

The University of Rochester’s Wilmot Cancer Institute has received a $29 million federal grant to research ways to reduce cancer symptoms and side effects.

The university announced Monday that it had won the grant, funded by the National Cancer Institute’s Community Oncology Research Program.

Karen Mustian, one of the principal investigators on the Wilmot research team, said the work the grant allows them to do was out of sight 20 years ago.

“It was so far out on the horizon,” she said. “It was something I was imagining.”

Mustian said the team is not doing any research into treating cancer. Instead, they’re looking into how cancer treatments can be made more bearable.

The common advice for chemotherapy patients used to be simply to rest, Mustian said. “Just take it easy; your body can’t take any more than that.”

But that advice was rarely informed by scientific research, or even by consulting with patients, Mustian said.

“My grandmothers — they both died of cancer in the 1990s, when there was very little recognition” of how people can live most comfortably during treatment, she said. “No one thought to ask, ‘How is this treatment making you feel?’ ”

Now, she said, doctors are learning that activities like yoga and exercise can drastically improve the quality of life for people undergoing chemotherapy. Still, the science is complicated.

“Exercise, while we think of it as being a relatively safe, innocuous intervention, that’s actually not the case. You can hurt yourself with exercise,” Mustian said. “What I might say to someone who doesn’t have cancer who says, ‘I want to look good in my dress for a special event’ will look very different than a patient who says, ‘I’m going through chemotherapy; I really want to reduce the amount of fatigue I’m experiencing.’”

Earlier this year, Dawn Schnell was getting chemotherapy as part of her breast cancer treatment. She was also participating in a study into treatment side effects at URMC, where she found that exercise gave her some of the best relief.

“I found particularly in the second round of chemo that I was in, I needed to be moving a lot, or my bones and my joints just ached uncontrollably,” Schnell said.

And the results went beyond physical comfort, she said.

“There really is such a thing as chemo brain, and when you exercise, you do feel a lot better,” said Schnell.

Mustian stressed that what worked for Schnell might not work for everyone. That’s the point of the research, she said.

Yoga, walking and resistance training are all forms of exercise that researchers have tested.

“We study exercise so that we can learn what the exact exercise prescription is that we need to tell a patient in order to treat their cancer outcome,” Mustian said.

“Rochester is really where the invention happens. We develop the interventions here.”

Then, under the federal grant, those interventions will be deployed to cancer clinics in 44 states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico and Guam, where they’ll be tested further.

The aim, Mustian said, is to develop guidance that’s included in training for future doctors.

Brett was the health reporter and a producer at WXXI News. He has a master’s degree from the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism.