The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI), part of the National Institutes of Health, awarded a $4.7 million grant to Cleveland Clinic to study the prevention of life-threatening, cancer-associated thrombosis.
Cleveland Clinic is a non-profit academic medical center. Advertising on our site helps support our mission. We do not endorse non-Cleveland Clinic products or services. Policy
The new funding will support a Cleveland Clinic-led research consortium, which will focus on developing strategies to prevent cancer-associated thrombosis.
The five-year grant, led by Keith McCrae, MD, and Alok Khorana, MD, supports the creation of a new risk assessment tool to better predict which cancer patients will develop blood clots during treatment. The project, led by Cleveland Clinic’s Taussig Cancer Institute and Lerner Research Institute, will coordinate a consortium of three sites involved in this NHLBI program. Other sites include Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (Harvard Medical School) and the University of Cincinnati.
“About 20 percent of cancer patients develop blood clots, which can cause stroke, hospitalization and delays in treatment. In fact, cancer-associated thrombosis is the second leading cause of death in patients with cancer,” says Dr. Khorana, Director of the Gastrointestinal Malignancies Program at Cleveland Clinic Cancer Center. “This grant will help us address the challenge of identifying who will develop blood clots and enable us to treat them proactively with blood thinners to prevent this complication.”
The study will incorporate data from more than 5,000 patients with colorectal, lung and pancreatic cancer enrolled in clinical trials at various research centers. Researchers will use this robust biobank to identify coagulation-related and genetic biomarkers associated with abnormal blood clotting. They will build on research that suggests that activation of a specific blood-clotting pathway may contribute to thrombosis, and that biomarkers related to that pathway may identify patients at particularly high risk of blood clots before they happen.
The team ultimately plans to synthesize this data to develop a comprehensive risk calculator by incorporating the identified biomarkers and statistical modeling. The online risk assessment tool would be available for clinical use.
“Cancer-associated blood clots are a critical clinical problem, and we urgently need better ways to predict which patients are at greatest risk,” says Dr. McCrae, Director of Hematology. “This NHLBI grant will provide new information that will greatly improve the management of patients with cancer, arming physicians with an advanced statistical tool to better identify who may develop this common and harmful side effect.”
The new grant builds upon important work initiated through Cleveland Clinic’s Center of Excellence in Cancer Thrombosis Research, which focuses on novel approaches to the management and prevention of cancer-associated thrombosis. Since its establishment in 2016, a multidisciplinary team of researchers across Cleveland Clinic, with collaborators at Case Western Reserve University, have worked together to study the efficacy of novel therapies, develop new preclinical models, and create and expand biorepositories. Dr. Khorana’s work is supported by the Sondra and Stephen Hardis Chair in Oncology Research.
First-of-its-kind research investigates the viability of standard screening to reduce the burden of late-stage cancer diagnoses
Study demonstrates ability to reduce patients’ reliance on phlebotomies to stabilize hematocrit levels
Findings highlight an association between obesity and an increased incidence of moderate-severe disease
Cleveland Clinic Cancer Institute takes multi-faceted approach to increasing clinical trial access
Key learnings from DESTINY trials
Gene editing technology offers promise for treating multiple myeloma and other hematologic malignancies, as well as solid tumors
Study of 401,576 patients reveals differences in cancer burdens as well as overall survival
Enfortumab plus pembrolizumab reduced risk of death by 53% compared with platinum-based chemotherapy