INNOVATORS Gold Award - New Orleans City Business

ON THE BRINK
Human Angiogenesis Assay
Key innovation: a more customized treatment of cancer
through an analysis of a patient’s blood vessels
Biggest client: graduate medical students
Where they’re based: New Orleans
Top executive: Dr. Eugene Woltering, lead researcher
Year introduced: in development
PHOTO BY FRANK AYMAMI
DOCTORS OFTEN WORK at a disadvantage when they
consider treatment options for a patient with a tumor.
The reason is simple: Judgments are often based on how
rodents with tumors have responded to a given therapy,
not the individual patient in question.
But those options will soon be enhanced by substantially
more reliable data with the introduction of the
Human Angiogenesis Assay, a technology specifically
designed to support a more customized treatment of cancer
through an analysis of a patient’s blood vessels.
“This means that we will be able to tell you what
exactly your tumor is doing and not make assumptions
based on a mouse’s tumor or what is going on with the
tumor of someone else,” said Dr. Eugene Woltering, the
James D. Rives Professor of Surgery and Neurosciences
at the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center
in New Orleans.
Woltering, who has filed nearly 20 patents relating to
diagnostic and therapeutic discoveries, has also been
granted patent protection for the Human Angiogenesis
Assay, which came about after years of studying the blood
vessels.
“In the fetus or children, there is an abundant amount
of blood vessels that grow. But in an adult, blood vessel
formation is never normal unless you are a female going
through the menstrual cycle,” Woltering said.
That made the study of blood vessels for Woltering
and his fellow researchers, which includes two other doctors
and three post-graduates, difficult until they considered
what happens to the typical placenta.
“When a woman delivers and both the mom and baby
are OK, the placenta typically ends up in a garbage can.
So we decided to harvest those placentas and dissect the
blood vessels out of them.”
By so doing, Woltering and his fellow researchers were
able to study more closely how such vessels respond to a
variety of treatments and drugs.
“It used to be that one drug fit all,” Woltering said.
“But now we can screen an individual tumor responding
to 20 different drugs and find out exactly the combination
that will work best. And that is very much a step in
the right direction.”•
— Garry Boulard
Dr. Eugene Woltering, a professor of surgery and neurosciences at the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center, is working to
customize treatment of cancer by analyzing a patient’s blood vessels.
New Orleans CityBusiness 55A