Metastases are responsible for over 90% of cancer deaths. In the upcoming issue of G&D, Dr. Robert Weinberg (MIT) and colleagues lend molecular insight into how microRNAs suppress tumor metastasis.

Scott Valastyan, lead author on the study, describes it as presenting “detailed mechanistic insight regarding the process of tumor metastasis, and identifies several key regulators of this process that might prove to be interesting diagnostic and/or therapeutic targets in breast cancer.”

Dr. Weinberg’s group previously showed that the human microRNA, miR-31, suppresses breast cancer metastasis and that its expression is associated with patient outcome. miR-31 regulates the expression of almost 200 genes. However, in this new paper, the authors identify that re-introduction of three miR-31 targets is sufficient to completely reverse miR-31’s influence on metastasis.

The researchers characterized both the individual and overlapping contributions that each of these three miR-31 effectors makes to the metastatic process. While three distinct steps are affected by this cohort of miR-31 targets (namely local invasion, early post-intravasation events and metastatic colonization), of particular interest was the finding that two of the three effectors regulate metastatic colonization - the final and rate-limiting step of metastasis.

Scott Valastyan emphasizes that “Our finding that miR-31, integrin-alpha5, and radixin affect the process of metastatic colonization may be of particular interest in light of the fact that colonization efficiency is strongly associated with patient survival outcome in many human tumor types - including breast cancer”.

Source:
Heather Cosel-Pieper

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

Although Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) has been classified as a class I (or definite) carcinogen by World Health Organization (WHO), the controversy as to why only a minority of infected patients develop gastric cancer still remains. Moreover, in Asian countries such as Indonesia, Japan, China, and Thailand, where the H. pylori infection rates are similar, there is a significant difference regarding the outcome of gastric cancer. That fact has been termed the “Asian paradox”.

A research article published in the World Journal of Gastroenterology addresses this question. Research, led by Murdani Abdullah, MD from Division of Gastroenterology, Department of Internal Medicine, University of Indonesia, was based on the old concept of a cascade of mucosal changes that develops from acute/chronic gastritis to gastric cancer as proposed by P. Correa. The difference in the pattern of H. pylori-associated gastritis may explain the difference in the incidence of gastric cancer between Indonesia and Japan. Previous studies have never evaluated the cascade of gastric mucosal changes prior to gastric cancer. In this research, the transformation of gastric mucosa that is induced by H. pylori infection prior to gastric cancer was investigated. The transformation was then compared between Indonesian and Japanese patients, the two countries that represent the “Asian paradox”.

From 1998 to 1999, 42 Japanese patients at Yamanashi Medical University Hospital, Koufu and 125 Indonesian patients at Metropolitan Medical Centre Hospital, Jakarta were consecutively enrolled. From this research, it was seen that there was a significant difference in the grade and activity of gastric mucosal changes between Indonesian and Japanese H. pylori-positive patients. This finding suggests that there may be a different host response between Indonesian and Japanese people regarding H. pylori infection. The authors believe that lifestyle and genetic factors are considered to play a major role, in the meantime, their research may act as the initial step in explaining the “Asian paradox”.

Reference: Abdullah M, Ohtsuka H, Rani AA, Sato T, Syam AF, Fujino MA. Helicobacter pylori infection and gastropathy: A comparison between Indonesian and Japanese patients. World J Gastroenterol 2009; 15(39): 4928-4931 http://www.wjgnet.com/1007-9327/15/4928.asp

Source: Jin-Lei Wang

World Journal of Gastroenterology

Bold new strategies in the battle against cancer may turn forms of the disease that presently are incurable into manageable conditions that can be controlled for long periods of time, according to an article in the current issue of Chemical & Engineering News, ACS’ weekly newsmagazine.

C&EN Senior Editor Lisa Jarvis notes that “molecularly targeted” drugs are having a major impact in treating cancer of the breast, colon, and other body parts. Those medications interfere with specific molecules involved in cancer’s growth and spread. However, further advances are critical.

One new strategy involves cutting off cancer cells’ supply of blood sugar, or glucose, and thus starving them to death. Another uses RNA interference, a form of gene therapy in which short RNA segments serve as medication to block the genes involved in cancer. Although scientists face major hurdles in developing effective methods for administering RNA-based medicines, they are making rapid progress in doing so.

Source
Chemical & Engineering News

Celsion Corporation (NASDAQ: CLSN) and Yakult Honsha Co., Ltd. (Tokyo: 2267) announced today that the first patient has been enrolled and treated in Japan as part of Celsion’s global Phase III ThermoDox HEAT trial for the treatment of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), the most common form of primary liver cancer.

Yakult is the exclusive licensee of Celsion’s ThermoDox for the Japanese territory and is responsible for funding clinical trials in Japan and obtaining regulatory and marketing approval. The clinical data from the Japanese cohort will be incorporated into Celsion’s overall ThermoDox Phase III study results and is also intended to support a potential marketing approval submission by Yakult in Japan.

“Yakult’s rapid start up of clinical sites and the enrollment of the first Japanese patient is a testament to their oncology expertise and strong commitment to commercialize ThermoDox in Japan,” stated Michael H. Tardugno, Celsion’s Chief Executive Officer. “With Yakult’s recent decision for participation to the study to include Japanese sites we expect to see an acceleration of patient enrollment and the potential to significantly decrease ThermoDox’s time to market in Japan should the data support registration.”

“ThermoDox holds the potential to become a significant drug in our pharmaceutical portfolio and an important addition to our oncology franchise,” stated Dr. Kiyoshi Terada, Head, Pharmaceutical Division/Senior Managing Director, and Member of the Board of Yakult. “Yakult’s decision to invest in ThermoDox was based on the remarkable evidence of clinical activity demonstrated in early stage clinical trials. ThermoDox holds great promise for those afflicted with HCC, as currently there is no chemotherapeutic standard of care.”

ThermoDox Global Phase III HCC Study

The global Phase III HCC study is evaluating the safety and efficacy of ThermoDox in combination with radiofrequency ablation (RFA) when compared to RFA alone. The trial will enroll up to six hundred patients at clinical sites in Japan, China, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, Hong Kong, Korea, Taiwan, Italy, the United States and Canada. By year-end 2009, Celsion expects to have up to sixty clinical sites activated and patient enrollment is expected to complete within the first half of 2010. Additional information can be found at: http://www.clinicaltrials.gov/

About Primary Liver Cancer

Primary liver cancer is a type of cancer that begins in the cells of the liver and is not typically detected early, often resulting in a poor patient prognosis. According to the National Cancer Center of Japan, primary liver cancer is the third leading cause of cancer deaths in Japan among adults and more than 40,000 people are diagnosed with the disease annually. Globally, primary liver cancer is one of the most deadly forms of cancer and ranks as the fifth most common solid tumor cancer. The incidence of primary liver cancer is approximately 20,000 cases per year in the United States and is rapidly growing worldwide at approximately 660,000 cases per year, due to the high prevalence of Hepatitis B and C in developing countries. The standard first line treatment for liver cancer is surgical resection of the tumor, but 80% to 90% of patients are ineligible for surgery. Radio frequency ablation (RFA) has increasingly become the standard of care for non-resectable liver tumors, but the treatment becomes less effective for larger tumors. There are few non-surgical therapeutic treatment options available as radiation therapy and chemotherapy are largely ineffective in the treatment of primary liver cancer.

About ThermoDox

ThermoDox in combination with hyperthermia has the potential to provide local tumor control and improve quality of life. ThermoDox is a proprietary heat-activated liposomal encapsulation of doxorubicin, an approved and frequently used oncology drug for the treatment of a wide range of cancers including breast cancer. Localized mild hyperthermia (40-42 degrees Celsius) releases the entrapped doxorubicin from the liposome. This delivery technology enables high concentrations of doxorubicin to be deposited preferentially in a targeted tumor.

ThermoDox has demonstrated evidence of efficacy in a Phase I study for primary liver cancer. Celsion has been granted FDA Orphan Drug designation for the primary liver indication and the global Phase III study is being conducted under a FDA Special Protocol Assessment. For recurrent chest wall breast cancer, ThermoDox(R) is being evaluated in a pivotal Phase I/II open-label, dose-escalating trial that is designed to measure durable local complete response at the tumor site. Celsion expects to enroll approximately 100 patients in the U.S. within calendar year 2010

ThermoDox® is a registered trademark of Celsion Corporation

About Yakult

Yakult is a leading Japanese company focused on the development and marketing of pharmaceuticals, foods, beverages, and cosmetics with an emerging presence in oncology. For more information on Yakult, visit: http://www.yakult.co.jp/english/index.html or view the following company profile: http://www.yakult.co.jp/english/top.html

Source
Celsion

Philanthropists Irwin and Joan Jacobs of La Jolla, CA are giving a $6.5 million gift to UCSF for head and neck cancer research. It is believed to be the largest private, U.S. gift for research supporting this disease.

Irwin Jacobs is the founder, retired CEO, and current board member of telecommunications giant Qualcomm. He is also a survivor of a rare form of the cancer.

The gift will establish two distinguished professorships at UCSF for head and neck cancer research, one in the Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery and one in the Department of Radiation Oncology:

• The Irwin Mark Jacobs and Joan Klein Jacobs Distinguished Professorship in Head and Neck Cancer - In honor of David W. Eisele, MD, professor and chair of otolaryngology-head and neck surgery, who is the first recipient.

• The Irwin Mark Jacobs and Joan Klein Jacobs Distinguished Professorship in Head and Neck Cancer Radiation Oncology - In honor of Jeanne Quivey, MD, professor of clinical radiation oncology, who is the first recipient.

The gift was announced by UCSF Chancellor Susan Desmond-Hellmann, MD, MPH, at a special celebration ceremony attended by the Jacobses and other special guests.

In 2007, Jacobs discovered, while showering in his La Jolla home, a bump at the back of his jaw near his left ear. Initially, he consulted a dentist, believing it was a dental problem. The bump was later diagnosed as an adenoid cystic carcinoma, a cancer that generally originates in the salivary glands and for Jacobs occurred in his parotid gland.

Within weeks of his diagnosis, Jacobs was under the care of Eisele, who removed the tumor with a parotidectomy, preserving Jacobs’ facial nerve. Quivey oversaw Jacobs’ postoperative radiation therapy.

Jacobs recounted that Quivey “warned me I’d probably lose all my hearing in the left ear, which I haven’t.” He added, “It did take away my sense of taste for a while. There was a time when the only thing that tasted good was vanilla ice cream.”

Head and neck cancers account for about three to five percent of all cancers in the U.S., according to the National Cancer Institute, with a small proportion of those cancers occurring in the salivary glands.

“It’s an unusual tumor,” said Eisele. “We don’t understand very well why these tumors occur. We don’t understand the variability from patient to patient. We’re very interested in the molecular underpinnings and the behaviors of these tumors so we can come up with more effective therapeutic strategies. The Jacobs’ generosity will help us hopefully make some creative discoveries.”

In addition to their department positions, both Eisele and Quivey are affiliated with the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Source:
Elizabeth Fernandez

University of California - San Francisco

An expert in cancer proteomics at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center has received $4.8 million in federal stimulus funding from the National Cancer Institute to co-lead a pilot study to assess the feasibility and scalability of a project that aims to measure all of the proteins in the human body.

“If successful, this study could help to stimulate a larger international endeavor that would be comparable to the Human Genome Project,” said Amanda Paulovich, M.D., Ph.D., a geneticist and oncologist in the Hutchinson Center’s Clinical Research Division who is co-leading the effort with Steven Carr, Ph.D., a senior scientific leader in protein biochemistry and proteomics at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass. A senior adviser on the project is N. Leigh Anderson, Ph.D., founder and chief executive officer of the Plasma Proteome Institute in Washington, D.C.

“In the same way that the Human Genome Project has had a tremendous impact on our ability to measure the expression levels of all 21,000 genes in human cells, we hope that the long-term output of this effort - the human Proteome Detection and Quantitation (hPDQ) project - will allow us to build a method to measure the products of those genes, which are the more than 100,000 proteins in the human body,” Paulovich said.

Understanding the body’s protein landscape is important because proteins are the workhorses of the cell that carry out genetic instructions. Changes in the structure or abundance of proteins are associated with genetic mutations that cause diseases such as cancer.

Currently there is no good way to simultaneously measure large numbers of human proteins, which presents a major obstacle to progress in both basic and applied translational research, in which fundamental scientific findings are translated into clinically useful results, from diagnostic and screening tests to drug development.

“You can’t study what you can’t measure,” Paulovich said. “Currently the biomedical research enterprise is severely hindered by its inability to measure the vast majority of human proteins.” Unlike gene signals, which can be amplified in the laboratory, protein volume cannot be dialed up. Because many proteins are present in very low quantities - like a needle in a haystack - they are below the limits of detection with current techniques.

This study is designed to change that. “This pilot has the potential of developing the first step toward making the entire human proteome clinically accessible,” said Henry Rodriguez, Ph.D., director of Clinical Proteomic Technologies for Cancer in the Office of the Director at the NCI.

“If we can create ways to measure a large fraction of human proteins, particularly those in very low abundance, this will facilitate the development of new drugs and personalized medicine,” Paulovich said.

Ultimately, the “holy grail” of proteomics is the discovery of protein biomarkers that could be used to create reliable and inexpensive blood tests to identify the onset and risk of a wide range of cancers and other diseases so they could be prevented or treated at the earliest possible stage, when cure rates are highest.

For the project, Paulovich and colleagues will use a highly sensitive and targeted analytical technology - multiple reaction monitoring mass spectrometry - to develop 400 assays, or tests, to measure the levels of 200 proteins found in breast-cancer cells. While the purpose of the study is to test the feasibility of scaling this technology to a much broader scale, a side benefit may be to determine whether certain proteins are associated with specific subtypes of breast cancer.

This type of mass spectrometry is not new - it has been used for years in clinical laboratories worldwide to measure drug metabolites and small molecules associated with inborn errors of metabolism. What is new is Paulovich and colleagues’ pioneering use of this technology, also known as triple quadropole mass spectrometry, to measure proteins.

Unlike traditional mass spectrometry, which attempts to detect all proteins in a biological sample in a scattershot fashion, this technology is highly targeted, allowing researchers to calibrate the equipment to specifically look for peptides, or protein fragments, of interest, filtering out the rest as white noise.

The approach used in the Hutchinson Center/Broad Institute collaboration is complementary to other ongoing protein-discovery initiatives such as the Human Proteome Project of the Human Proteome Organization (HUPO) and the Swedish Human Proteome Resource. “While these other groups are identifying proteins expressed in different human cell types, we will complement their work by quantifying the expression of proteins beginning with those of potential clinical interest,” Paulovich said. “We’ll measure these proteins to see if their abundance changes in relation to disease.”

The project also includes collaborators at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as well as a commercial partnership with Applied Biosystems of Life Technologies, whose AB Sciex triple quadrupole mass-spectrometry equipment will be used for the project.

To maximize productivity, Paulovich and colleagues also will closely coordinate activities and share their results with Robert Moritz, Ph.D., a faculty member and director of proteomics at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, who recently received federal stimulus funding to lead a related human proteome project.

Source:
Kristen Woodward

Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center

The European Medicines Agency has been formally notified by AstraZeneca of its decision to withdraw its application for a centralised marketing authorisation for the medicine Zactima (vandetinib), 100 mg film-coated tablets.

Zactima was expected to be used in combination with chemotherapy, for the treatment of patients with locally advanced or metastatic non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) who have received prior anticancer therapy.

The application for the marketing authorisation for Zactima was submitted to the Agency on 30 June 2009. At the time of the withdrawal, it was under review by the Agency’s Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use (CHMP).

In its official letter, the company stated that the withdrawal of the application was based on the preliminary comments from the Rapporteur and Co-Rapporteur, which indicate that at this point in time the Committee would be unlikely to conclude on a favourable benefit-risk balance for the product in the treatment of NSCLC in combination with chemotherapy.

More information about Zactima and the state of the scientific assessment at the time of withdrawal will be made available in a question-and-answer document. This document, together with the withdrawal letter from the company, will be published on the Agency’s website after the next CHMP meeting of 16-19 November 2009.

Notes

1. Withdrawal of an application does not prejudice the possibility of a company making a new application at a later stage.

Source
EMEA

A specific type of T helper cell awakens the immune system to the stealthy threat of cancer and triggers an attack of killer T cells custom-made to destroy the tumors, scientists from The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center report in the early online edition of the journal Immunity.

The role of Th17, one of only four known types of T helper cell, opens a possible avenue for overcoming cancer’s ability to suppress or hide from the body’s immune system, said senior author Chen Dong, Ph.D., professor in M. D. Anderson’s Department of Immunology. Dong and colleagues found that Th17 stifled development of metastatic melanoma tumors in the lungs of mice.

“While there is much work to be done, these preclinical findings imply the possibility of taking a patient’s Th17 cells, expanding them in the lab, and then re-infusing them as treatment,” Dong said. Development of a vaccine to stimulate Th17 cells would be another possible application.

Dong earlier discovered the existence of Th17 cells and established that they secrete the inflammatory protein interleukin-17 (IL-17). His lab showed that overexpression of IL-17 contributes to both autoimmune and inflammatory diseases.

“Th17 cells also are found in a variety of solid tumors and we wanted to know whether these cells promote cancer or play a preventive or protective role,” Dong said.

Their research showed that mice made deficient in Th17 cells and then injected with a strain of melanoma that gathers in the lungs experienced aggressive cancer growth compared to mice with normal levels of Th17. At 16 days, tumors in the knockout mice had fused together and coated the lung so extensively that they were no longer countable.

Next, they tested Th17 for preventive effect, injecting Th17 cells primed with tumor-specific antigens and the melanoma cells at the same time. At 16 days, mice with Th17 had low or barely detectable levels of cancer while control mice had a heavy tumor burden in their lungs.

A third set of experiments tested a treatment effect, showing that mice injected with Th17 after they already had melanoma in their lungs had a 75 percent reduction in tumor burden compared with normal mice.

In all experiments, mice with Th17 also had higher levels of several categories of immune system cell than did those with normal or suppressed Th17.

T cells are lymphocytes, a type of white blood cell produced by the thymus equipped with receptors that recognize and bind to antigens, pieces of invading organisms presented to the T cells by dendritic cells. The bound antigen converts the T cell to T helper cells that secrete signaling molecules called cytokines to launch an appropriate immune response. Helper cells, in effect, guide the adaptive immune response.

In the Immunity paper, additional experiments outlined the specific pathway by which Th17 suppresses tumors:

- Tumor invasion of the lung attracts Th17 cells that secrete IL-17A.
- IL-17A in turn promotes the secretion of two chemokines, CCL2 and CCL20, which recruit leukocytes to the tumor site.
- The leukocytes include dendritic cells, which seize tumor antigens and migrate to the lymph nodes.
- There, the antigens are used to prime CD8+ killer cells, which then migrate to the lung and kill established tumors.

The research was funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health, M. D. Anderson’s Center for Targeted Therapy, a Leukemia and Lymphoma Society Scholar Award to Dong, and a Trust Fellowship of M. D. Anderson.

Co-authors with Dong and first author Natalia Martin-Orozco, Ph.D., are Yeonseok Chung, Ph.D., Xuexian O. Yang, Ph.D., and Tomohide Yamazaki, all of the Department of Immunology; Pawel Muranski, M.D., and Nicholas Restifo, M.D., both of the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health; Sijie Lu, Ph.D., of M. D. Anderson’s Department of Stem Cell Transplantation and Cell Therapy; and Patrick Hwu, M.D., and William Overwijk, Ph.D., both of M. D. Anderson’s Department of Melanoma Medical Oncology.

Source
University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center

The experiment, featured on the cover of the leading weekly science journal Cell of October 30, shows that cells use chance to survive uncertainty.

“God does not play dice,” said Einstein to explain that chance does not intervene in nature. However, researcher Jordi García Ojalvo, from the Campus of the UPC in Terrassa, has carried out an experiment, featured on the cover of the leading weekly international journal Cell of October 30 that shows that this is not the case for living organisms. The experiment is the first to succeed in creating a synthetic gene circuit that functions in the same manner as a natural live stem cell.

Why do living beings choose to function a certain way? Why do cells base their operation on certain gene circuits and not others? These questions are among the central issues of contemporary science; we need to know the answers in order to understand how living beings work and how cell imbalances cause all kinds of diseases, from cancer to autoimmune diseases. Researcher Jordi García Ojalvo, from the Campus of the UPC in Terrassa, has faced these issues by designing the first ever synthetic gene circuit that works in the same way as an in vivo natural circuit, and he has compared the two.

The experiment, carried out by the researcher in collaboration with American scientists, has shown that chance plays a very important role in living organisms. According to García Ojalvo’s study, featured on the cover of the leading weekly international journal Cell of October 30, cells rely on chance to win the game of evolution, to survive and adapt to the uncertainty of the environment in which they live. “Living beings do play dice, and they even win,” says García Ojalvo. “Cells often do not know when they will find the nutrients that will enable them to continue living and playing their role. As their future is unpredictable, they act using chance as the most effective tool for survival. Therefore, some genetic circuits are designed to behave randomly. “

The researcher at the UPC Campus in Terrassa reached this important conclusion after designing the first ever synthetic gene circuit that has the same functions as the natural circuit of a living cell. The synthetic circuit, which is based on mathematical models and is introduced into the bacterium Bacillus subtilis, behaves in a more predictable way than the natural circuit, but is less efficient when it attempts to procure alternative nutrients in uncertain environments (these alternative nutrients are pieces of DNA that the bacteria can find in the extracellular medium).

The research of Jordi García Ojalvo was carried out with the participation of researchers Suel Gurol of the Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas and Michael Elowitz of the California Institute of Technology, both in the United States.

Source: Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya

The University of Southern California has been selected to establish a $16 million cancer research center as part of a new strategy against the disease by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and its National Cancer Institute.

The five-year award will create a National Cancer Institute Physical Science-Oncology Center based at USC and involving a consortium of universities. Partnering in the USC grant will be Arizona State University, the California Institute of Technology, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York University, Stanford University, the University of Arizona and the University of Texas at Austin.

The Physical Science-Oncology Center initiative differs from past cancer research programs. While cancer biologists often work with scientists in other fields, this marks the first large-scale recruitment of outside scientists in the battle against the disease.

Noted technology innovator and entrepreneur W. Daniel Hillis, research professor of engineering at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and professor of research medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, is the principal investigator for the effort.

“This funding allows us to bring together a unique team of physicists, mathematicians, engineers and biologists to work together with physicians on the understanding and treatment of cancer,” said Hillis, who is also co-chairman of Applied Minds Inc. and a former Disney Imagineering executive.

The new center is one of 12 in the nation to receive the designation as a Physical Science-Oncology Center.

“By bringing a fresh set of eyes to the study of cancer, these new centers have great potential to advance, and sometimes challenge, accepted theories about cancer and its supportive microenvironment,” said John E. Niederhuber, director of the National Cancer Institute. “Physical scientists think in terms of time, space, pressure, heat and evolution in ways that we hope will lead to new understandings of the multitude of forces that govern cancer - and with that understanding, we hope to develop new and innovative methods of arresting tumor growth and metastasis.”

The five-year grant will allow the USC center to focus on creating a set of “virtual cancer” models based on measurements from individual cancer patients. The models then would be used to simulate cancer growth and predict drug responses for each patient.

“Clinical tools to accurately describe, evaluate and predict an individual’s response to cancer therapy are a field-wide priority,” said David Agus, senior co-investigator on the grant and professor of medicine at the Keck School of Medicine and director of the USC Center for Applied Molecular Medicine and the USC Westside Prostate Cancer Center. “The center brings to USC a network of scientists from multiple disciplines to try and control cancer with new ideas.”

The USC-led consortium will develop a single, integrated, virtual cancer model that describes cancer’s complexity from the smallest interactions at the molecular-cellular level to large-scale phenomena of how a tumor interacts with its host.

Specifically, the consortium will model: networks of interactions at the molecular and cellular levels; tumor molecular phylogenetic evolution; tumor growth, invasiveness and vasculature; and tumor interaction with host factors and the immune system.

“The models we are going to develop are based on a dataset spanning the many facets of cancer as interrogated by a suite of novel measurement platforms. Our unique dataset will enable us to rigorously describe cancer as the complex system it is,” said Parag Mallick, assistant professor of research at the Keck School of Medicine, one of the project co-leaders who played a critical role in writing the grant establishing the center at USC. “We will be primarily describing therapeutic response of non-Hodgkins lymphoma to standard chemotherapy, but additionally ensuring the generality of our approach by investigating acute myelogenous leukemia and non-small-cell lung cancer.”

According to USC Executive Vice President and Provost C. L. Max Nikias, “This grant honors outstanding interdisciplinary research efforts that have transformational potential within the biological and medical sciences. USC is honored to lead a consortium of such a high caliber.”

The winning grant proposal was assembled and submitted with the guidance of USC’s Washington, D.C. Research Advancement Office. “We greatly appreciate the effort of Steven Moldin, executive director of research advancement, and his colleagues who brought together all the various universities and institutes into the research project,” said Randolph Hall, USC vice provost for research advancement. “Without their efforts, the grant would not have been submitted.”

In addition to the research partner institutions, the USC-led initiative features consulting researchers from several academic, industry and institutional partners, including: Prognosys BioSciences, the Translational Genomics Research Institute, Princeton University, the University of California, Irvine, the Santa Fe Institute, Applied Proteomics and Applied Minds.

Noteworthy consultants and collaborators include Stanford’s Sanjiv Gambhir, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s Scott Lowe and the Santa Fe Institute’s Nobel Laureate Murray Gell-Mann.

About the NIH/NCI Physical Science-Oncology Center Initiative

The National Cancer Institute is launching a network of 12 centers that will bring a new cadre of theoretical physicists, mathematicians, chemists and engineers to the study of cancer. During the five-year initiative, the Physical Sciences-Oncology Centers will take new, non-traditional approaches to cancer research by studying the physical laws and principles of cancer; evolution and evolutionary theory of cancer; information coding, decoding, transfer and translation in cancer; and ways to de-convolute cancer’s complexity.

The National Cancer Institute has awarded grants to 12 Physical Science-Oncology Centers which will be the focal points of a research network that will span the country. The 12 institutions are:

- Arizona State University

- Cornell University
- H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute

- Johns Hopkins University
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology

- Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center

- Northwestern University
- Princeton University
- Scripps Research Institute

- University of California, Berkeley

- University of Southern California

- University of Texas Health Science Center (Houston)

Each of the Physical Science-Oncology Centers has convened groups of experts that individually and collectively will support and nurture a transdisciplinary environment and promote research that originates and tests novel, non-traditional, physical sciences-based approaches to understand and control cancer; generates independent sets of physical measurements and integrates them with existing knowledge of cancer; and develops and evaluates approaches from the physical sciences to provide a comprehensive and dynamic picture of cancer.

Ultimately, through coordinated development and testing of novel approaches to studying cancer processes, the network of Physical Science-Oncology Centers is expected to generate new bodies of knowledge in order to identify and define critical aspects of physics, chemistry and engineering that operate at all levels in cancer processes.

More information about the Physical Science-Oncology Centers program can be found at http://physics.cancer.gov

For more information on the USC Physical Science-Oncology Center, visit here.

Source
University of Southern California

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