Updated Dec. 3, 2012

MD Anderson has six new Fellows in the American Association for the Advancement of Science, elected by their peers to a scientific organization that dates to 1874.

"Election as an AAAS Fellow is wonderful recognition of scientific excellence and leadership by the people who know best - colleagues, collaborators and competitors in the field," said Thomas Buchholz, M.D., interim provost and executive vice president at MD Anderson.

MD Anderson now has 20 AAAS Fellows on its faculty. The newest are:

• Sharon Dent, Ph.D., professor and chair of MD Anderson's Department of Molecular Carcinogenesis
• Elizabeth Grimm, Ph.D., professor in the Department of Melanoma Medical Oncology
• Raghu Kalluri, Ph.D.,  professor and chair, Cancer Biology.
• Hagop Kantarjian, M.D., professor and chair of the Department of Leukemia
• Bill Plunkett, Ph.D., professor in the Department of Experimental Therapeutics. Biological Sciences. 
• Anil Sood, M.D., professor in the departments of Gynecological Medical Oncology and Cancer Biology.
  

The AAAS is the world's largest general scientific society.The nonprofit AAAS publishes the journals Science, Science Translational Medicine and Science Signaling and fulfills its mission to "advance science and serve society" through initiatives in science policy, international programs, science education and other efforts.

MD Anderson news release and photos

A protein that sneaks into the cell nucleus and sets off two separate cancer-promoting processes vital to the development of malignant brain tumors makes itself an enticing target for therapy.

Having exposed that dangerous behavior by pyruvate kinase M2 (PKM2) in a series of major publications, MD Anderson scientist Zhimin Lu, M.D., Ph.D., has uncovered a vulnerability that he thinks could turn the metabolic protein into "an Achilles' heel for cancer."

In a paper this week in Nature Cell Biology, Lu and colleagues identified a drug that inhibits growth of brain tumors in mice by thwarting PKM2.

Lu, an associate professor in MD Anderson's Department of Neuro-Oncology, and colleagues have discovered:

•        The cellular mechanism that overexpresses PKM2 in cancer cells.
•       The complex pathway that smuggles PKM2 into the cell nucleus.
•        How in the nucleus PKM2 activates genes involved in cell division and in a glucose metabolism pathway that nourishes brain tumors and other types of cancer called the Warburg effect.

"For tumors to form, PKM2 must get to the nucleus to activate genes involved in cell proliferation and the Warburg effect," Lu said. "If we can keep it out of the nucleus, we can block both of those cancer-promoting pathways."

A grimmer prognosis awaits African-Americans when compared to Caucasian patients suffering from renal cell carcinoma (RCC), the most common form of invasive kidney cancer.

In a recent study lead at the National Cancer Institute and published in the Cancer journal, researchers found that African-Americans tend to have a poorer 5-year survival rate than Caucasians regardless of clinical data and patient demographics. "There is a consistent disparity between the races," said Wong-Ho Chow, Ph.D., professor in MD Anderson's Department of Epidemiology and lead investigator on the study.

In this study, clinical data and demographics of nearly 40,000 RCC patients diagnosed over a 15-year period from 12 registries in the National Cancer Institute's Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) program, were analyzed.

The study revealed the 5-year relative survival rate for Caucasians diagnosed with invasive kidney cancer was 72.6% as compared to 68% for African-Americans regardless of age, sex, tumor size or stage, type of RCC and surgical procedures performed. SEER data also showed a poorer survival rate among men and older patients as compared to women and younger patients.