Hawaii is known for many things: surfing, beautiful beaches, pineapples, and now, cancer research. Michele Carbone, MD, PhD (Human Pathology), has recently been named director of the Cancer Research Center of Hawaii. He began his three-year term September 1, 2009, having previously served as the Center's interim director since December 2008.
Prior to joining the Center, Dr. Carbone had been a professor at Loyola University Medical Center's Cardinal Bernadin Cancer Center in Chicago and has spent most of his career researching thoracic cancers. Deemed an authority on malignant mesothelioma, a rare cancer related to asbestos exposure, Dr. Carbone and his research team have studied the impact of genetics, environmental carcinogens and viral infections on mesothelioma development.
"Our goal is to develop novel preventive and therapeutic approaches and bring them to the community and the patient's bedside," Carbone says. "We work in synergy with the major hospitals in the State of Hawai‘i, with their physicians, and with other cancer organizations to prevent and cure cancer."
When Carbone first began studying the disease in 1991, little was known about its causes beyond its link to asbestos. During the course of his career, he has uncovered a link between genetics and a U.S. government-mandated vaccine from the 1950s and '60s that can greatly increase odds of contracting mesothelioma. "I found… that humans had massively been exposed to SV40 (a DNA tumor virus) in the late '50s and early '60s through contaminated polio vaccines,” he says, “and that the enormous increase in the incidence of mesothelioma from about zero in 1950 to 2,000 to 3,000 deaths per year presently had occurred after people were exposed to SV40.” Not every dose contained the virus, but it is estimated that 10 million to 30 million Americans were exposed.
Dr. Carbone has received more than half of all federal funding for mesothelioma and approximately 90 percent of the National Cancer Institute’s funding allocated for mesothelioma research. "Funding from the National Institutes of Health is very low because of the whole economy of the United States, so we have gone from a pay line six years ago of about 26 percent to a pay line of 11 percent. Therefore, it's a difficult time to do research and you need to find additional sources of funding, specifically philanthropy," he says. "I think it will help Hawaii if people on Mainland do not think of Hawaii only as a vacation place, but also as a place where normal people live normal lives and have normal jobs, for example, medical research.”
Carbone and his research offer hope for a diagnosis that has been nothing but grim in the past. He and his research team have participated in studies that led to the isolation of a new serum marker, osteopontin, which appears useful to identify patients with early mesothelioma. He explains that, "If we can validate prospectively the usefulness of these serological markers, we will be able to monitor cohorts of workers exposed to asbestos for early sign of mesothelioma and for early treatment that is linked to a better survival. I really believe that we can help people and make a difference."
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