Fox Chase Cancer Center announced on May 4 that Mitchell Fane, PhD, is leading research to understand how aging affects cancer risk, treatment response, and side effects in older adults. The effort aims to address the gap between the age of most cancer patients and the younger subjects typically used in research.
Fane said this focus is important because age is a strong risk factor for nearly every type of cancer. He said treatments that work well for younger patients may not have the same results or side effects in older people. “For decades, we have treated age as a background detail rather than a central factor in cancer. But aging affects the immune system, how tumors behave, and how patients tolerate therapy. We can’t ignore it anymore,” Fane said.
Fane’s interest in this area comes from personal experience with his grandmother’s melanoma diagnosis later in life. “My grandmother developed melanoma later in life and eventually passed away,” he said. “She was offered immunotherapy, but she believed she was too old and frail to tolerate it.” He added: “I couldn’t help but think that if there had been more research, and more confidence in treating older patients, she might have had a different set of options.”
A key part of Fane’s work involves developing new models for studying cancer using aged mice instead of young ones—addressing what he calls a major reason many drugs fail when tested on humans after success with young animal models. “The biology just doesn’t match,” Fane said. “We are testing drugs in young, healthy immune systems and then expecting them to behave the same way in much older patients.” Fox Chase has now established an aged mouse facility so researchers can better reflect real-world patient ages.
This approach could improve treatment decisions for elderly patients by providing data specific to their needs—for example by challenging assumptions about tolerability of therapies like immunotherapy among seniors. Another focus is understanding why cancer risk appears to decline after age 80 or 85: “We want to understand why very old individuals seem to develop less cancer than expected,” Fane said.
Located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Fox Chase Cancer Center was founded in 1904. Its current president is Dr. Robert Uzzo; it functions as a training hospital with over 5,000 surgeries performed and nearly 3,500 admissions reported during one recent year according to the organization.
Fane’s research has received more than $850,000 from various organizations over three years and was recently featured at an American Association for Cancer Research meeting.
