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

Preet Chaudhary, M.D., Ph.D., has been named chief of the Jane Anne Nohl Division of Hematology and Center for the Study of Blood Diseases at the University of Southern California Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center and Hospital, effective January 1, 2010.

An internationally renowned physician-scientist, Chaudhary will serve as professor of medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, Department of Medicine, and as co-leader of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Program and associate director for translational research at the USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center.

“Dr. Chaudhary has a very diverse background in translational research and clinical care, which has prepared him well to lead at this pivotal time of growth in the division of hematology and at our academic medical center,” says Carmen A. Puliafito, M.D., M.B.A., dean of the Keck School of Medicine of USC.

“Dr. Chaudhary is an outstanding physician scientist who will play a major role in the cancer center,” says Peter A. Jones, director of the USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center. “He has an active basic science laboratory, as well as profound clinical skills, making him an exceptional addition to our institution.”

Chaudhary comes to USC from the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, where he is professor of medicine, director for translational research, leader of the hematologic malignancies program and co-leader of the cancer stem cell program. He was recruited to USC after an extensive search led by Stuart Siegel, chief of the division of hematology-oncology at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles.

“USC has a combination of factors which make it a very exciting place to be right now. The dynamic and experienced leadership team is doing everything right to make it a powerhouse in patient care, education and research,” says Chaudhary.

As chief of the Jane Anne Nohl Division of Hematology and Center for the Study of Blood Diseases, Chaudhary has several priorities, including developing the division of hematology into a regional leader and center of excellence in the next three to five years, and a national leader in the next decade.

The division was strengthened by a $60 million gift from the estate of Jane Anne Nohl in late 2007. USC Norris and the division of hematology were chosen as a beneficiary based on the outstanding care a close friend received from Donald Feinstein, hematologist and professor emeritus of medicine at the Keck School.

As a physician-scientist dedicated to hematologic oncology, Chaudhary has research interests in several areas of cancer, including AIDS-associated cancers, cancer drug resistance, biology of normal and leukemic hematopoietic stem cells, programmed cell death and cellular signaling. He is also interested in molecularly targeted and biological therapies for leukemias, lymphomas, multiple myeloma and solid tumors, and novel strategies to improve the outcome of stem cell transplantation. Chaudhary holds six U.S. patents in the areas of hematopoietic stem cell purification, multi-drug resistance to cancer chemotherapy and cellular signaling.

His research has been continuously funded by multiple National Institutes of Health grants since 2000 and he currently serves as the principal investigator of two R01 grants, two R21 grants and one grant each from the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society and the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation.

Chaudhary has published in some of the top scientific journals, including Cell, Immunity, JNCI, PNAS and Blood. He has been the recipient of numerous honors, fellowships and awards from national and international research organizations and has been elected to the prestigious American Society for Clinical Investigation, an honor society of the top physician-scientists in the country.

After graduating from Maulana Azad Medical College in India, Chaudhary obtained his Ph.D. under the guidance of Dr. Igor Roninson at the University of Illinois at Chicago, performing pioneering research in the isolation and characterization of bone marrow stem cells and mechanisms of multi-drug resistance to cancer chemotherapy. He did his residency training in internal medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago and fellowship training in hematology and oncology at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the University of Washington in Seattle.

Source
University of Southern California