Recently in Grants and Funding Category

Renowned artist Peter Max will donate a custom portrait to benefit the Children's Art Project at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center

Peter Max, who capitalized on the psychedelic 60s and is still painting today, loves to combine his passions for painting and astronomy. In November, he will jet his way to the Off the Wall Gallery in the Houston Galleria where a special selection of his recent works, "Colors of a Better World," will be on display.

Max, who was born in Germany, still finds himself fascinated by his original interest in the universe and astronomy. He explains that the comparison of the size of a person to the size of the earth is an incredible thought. "I'm just amazed at this universe and still wonder how it happened," he said.

However, a chance invitation to attend art school got in the way of his desire to be an astronomer. "I went to art school and got the bug," Max explains. However, his artwork is filled with suns and moons and stars, all astronomical images.

Based in New York City, Max says that he can't wait to get to work each morning and always hates to leave. Fortunately, he lives near to his studio where he comes in daily to paint.

Along the way, Max also discovered his philanthropic side. To that end, he is donating the painting of a custom portrait to a lucky bidder in a silent auction at the Off the Wall Gallery. Bids may be placed at the Houston gallery beginning Saturday, Nov. 7 and continuing through Saturday, Nov. 14 at 8 p.m.

The winner of the portrait will be notified at the event or by phone on Monday, Nov. 16, 2009. All proceeds from this auction will go directly to the Children's Art Project at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center to help make life better for children with cancer. Through worldwide sales of young cancer patients' original artwork featured on seasonal note cards and gifts as well as through generous donations, the project has funded offerings from the Children's Cancer Hospital such as educational programs, college scholarships, summer camps, ski trips, the Child Life program and other exciting activities that benefit cancer patients and their families.

Don't miss this chance to see the recent work of Peter Max. Previews of the art begin Nov. 7 at the Off the Wall Gallery in the Houston Galleria. Max himself will be at the gallery on Saturday, Nov. 14 from 6-9 p.m. and Sunday, Nov. 15 from 1-4 p.m. The gallery would appreciate an RSVP, 713-871-0940, if you plan to come by.

Cancer eludes, suppresses or subverts the body's immune system to survive and grow.  
Scientists at M. D. Anderson have found that the helper T cell Th17 awakens the immune system to attack and destroy tumors with custom-made killer T cells.  Professor of Immunology Chen Dong, Ph.D., and colleagues report their findings online today at the journal Immunity.  

Working with a mouse model of metastatic human melanoma tumors, the researchers show that the absence of Th17 led to virulent growth of melanoma in the lungs, while injecting Th17 cells prevented melanoma development and destroyed existing tumors. Th17 secretes the inflammatory protein interleukin-17 (Il-17), which launches the immune system response. 



"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 is co-discoverer of Th17, one of only four known types of T helper cells that guide adaptive immune system response.  His team also established that Th17 produces interleukin-17 and further showed that overexpression of IL-17 causes both autoimmune and inflammatory diseases.  

Th17's involvement in autoimmune disease is probably why it is able to recognize and attack cancer, which is also self tissue.  "So a key to developing therapy will be to use Th17 cells that only recognize tumor antigens but do not react to normal tissue," Dong said.

Read the full News Release
AAI Honors Chen Dong for Breakthrough T Lymphocyte Research

It takes some imagination to grasp the raw computational challenge researchers face trying to understand the molecular causes of cancer. John Weinstein, M.D., Ph.D., professor and chair of M. D. Anderson's Department of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, likes to start with this imagery.

"If you unpacked the DNA in every cell of a single person and stretched it end to end, it would circle the equator 917,000 times -- the equivalent of 120 round trips to the sun. One error in replicating the genome in one unlucky place -- over a length of 120 trips to the sun and back -- can lead to cancer. Our challenges are to understand how that happens, and to know what to do about it if we can't prevent it in the first place."  

Now, consider that there are usually many more errors spread across that expanse and that they tend to interact with each other in a maze of complexity. Add current techniques to profile genetic expression and variation that capture a galaxy of data, and you have enough information to choke traditional methods of analysis.

The Cancer Genome Atlas, a federally funded project to make sense of the genetics that drive 20 different cancers, has enlisted Weinstein and colleagues at M. D. Anderson to help with this problem. A five-year, $8.3 million grant will allow the team to apply cutting-edge approaches to find the right buckets of information in an ocean of data.

They will blend agile software development, Bayesian statistics, and a flexible and efficient database infrastructure called semantic web with M. D. Anderson's expertise in clinical and translational research to compile the most meaningful data in a tumor's tangled molecular profile.

Success will mean better treatment choices, improved risk assessment, diagnosis and prognosis. "The bottom line is personalizing cancer medicine," Weinstein says.

A unique approach to understanding how cancer cells or microbes become capable of warding off drugs has earned a New Innovator Award from the National Institutes of Health for an M. D. Anderson scientist.

Gábor Balázsi, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Systems Biology, will receive $1.5 million over five years under the highly competitive program. The NIH announced awards Thursday in three prestigious programs that fund bold ideas, with the potential to speedily translate research into improved human health. 



"Therapy fails when cancer cells or disease-causing microbes become resistant to drugs. We will apply new, non-conventional methods to control expression of a drug-resistance gene in cells that are then treated with chemotherapy," Balázsi says. "We expect to discover new mechanisms underlying the emergence of drug resistance, which could improve treatment of cancer and of microbial infections as well."

Balázsi and colleagues are synthetic biologists who have created gene circuits that allow them to tightly control expression of a gene, dialing it from completely off through varying levels of expression to completely on.

A newly developed circuit also will permit them to control fluctuations in gene expression. This unique degree of control will allow more detailed investigation of the effects of genes involved in drug resistance.

"These are highly competitive awards for the most innovative science. Being chosen as a recipient is a significant accomplishment," says M. D. Anderson Provost and Executive Vice President Raymond DuBois, M.D., Ph.D.  "His research concept is exciting and holds promise for improving our ability to adjust very specific cellular levels of a variety of genes and then test drug resistance, among other things."


Read the News Release
M. D. Anderson Scientist Wins NIH New Innovator Award

By Tomise Martin, Staff Writer

Inspired by her passion to help others and her courageous fight with a rare disease, family and friends of Marnie Rose, M.D., have donated more than $1 million to brain cancer research at M. D. Anderson.

"The Dr. Marnie Rose Foundation is named after my daughter who died from a malignant brain tumor at age 28," said Lanie Rose, mother of Marnie. "She was beautiful, bright and as a pediatric medical resident, she devoted her life to caring for children. Through the foundation, we honor her legacy by helping both children and brain cancer patients in need."

All funds raised by the Dr. Marnie Rose Foundation for M. D. Anderson go directly to research of treatments. With guidance from Raymond Sawaya, M.D.and Alfred Yung, M.D., professor and chair of the Department of Neuro-Oncology the foundation has funded five research projects over the last seven years. Two of those therapies funded, PEP-3-KLH, a therapy that trains the immune system to attack brain tumor cells, and Delta-24-RGD, a modified adenovirus that targets the pathway of a specific protein, have shown promising results in the lab and are now in clinical trials.



"Since 2003, we've been able to sponsor brain cancer patients and fund clinical trials for immunotherapy and other research," Lanie said. "During M. D. Anderson's annual patient conference for brain tumor patients, a young man thanked our foundation for our help in his care. Because of the research our foundation supports, he joined a clinical trial that provided innovative treatment."

Resources

Run for the Rose 5K Fun Run

The mission of M. D. Anderson's Odyssey Program is to support the best among the newest generation of cancer researchers here and encourage them to explore novel areas of clinical, translational, basic or population-based cancer research. To fulfill this mission, the Odyssey Program supports them and their research during their post-doctoral training, a critical career phase during which scientists first develop independence and a funding track record.

Odyssey Fellowships are given annually, with a start date of Sept. 1, following an open call for applicants and a rigorous peer-review process. This round we had 41 applications from 26 departments and were able to support three new fellows, about 7%, making the Odyssey Program's competition one of the toughest. You can compare this to the National Institutes of Health payline, which even in the toughest times has stayed above 10%.

The three awardees who will join the Odyssey Program in 2009 are:

• Dr. Calley Hirsch from Dr. Sharon Dent's lab (Department of Genetics): "The Role of Gcn5 in Mouse Embryonic Stem Cells"

• Dr. Marites Melancon from Dr. Jason Stafford's lab (Department of Imaging Physics): "Targeted Nanoshell-Based Agents for MRI-Guided Thermal Ablation of Head and Neck Cancer"

• Dr. Sofie Claerhout from Dr. Gordon Mills' lab (Department of Systems Biology): "Tumor Dormancy and Autophagy -- Implications for Breast Cancer"

I want to thank the Odyssey Program Advisory Committee for their hard work in scoring these applications.

The Odyssey Program is supported by  endowments from the Theodore N. Law Award For Scientific Achievement, Houston Endowment, Inc. Award for Scientific Achievement, H-E-B Award for Scientific Achievement, Kimberly-Clark Foundation Award for Scientific Achievement, Cockrell Foundation Award for Scientific Achievement, The Kimberly Clark Fund for New and Innovative Research. Recently the program has received generous support from the CFP Foundation and the Arnold Family Foundation.

Top scientists at M. D. Anderson, Harvard Medical School and Memorial Sloan-Kettering are joining together to find a way to block a twisted molecular pathway that propels endometrial, breast and ovarian cancers.

The three institutions share a three-year, $15 million Dream Team grant from Stand Up To Cancer, an entertainment industry initiative to fund cancer research that moves new treatments to patients more quickly.  

"The pathway involved here is the most common abnormally activated pathway in all of cancer," says Gordon Mills, M.D., Ph.D., professor and chair of M. D. Anderson's Department of Systems Biology and a co-leader on the project with two other scientists. "What we learn in women's cancers will apply to many other types."



"Stand Up To Cancer's novel approach, bringing top investigators together in Dream Teams across institutions, has never been tried on this scale before," says Raymond DuBois, M.D., Ph.D., M. D. Anderson provost and executive vice president and a member of the Stand Up To Cancer Scientific Advisory Committee.
 
"Most funding sources award research grants to groups housed within the walls of a single institution. These five powerful collaborations generated proposals that could have a major impact on the care of cancer patients, and do so more quickly than would have occurred if the institutions had acted separately."

DuBois, who helped organize the project during his term as president of the American Association for Cancer Research, was interviewed on the CBS Early Show by the network's news anchor, Katie Couric.

M. D. Anderson researchers have significant roles on two other Dream Teams.

A Dream Team designed to advance epigenetic cancer therapy will draw on the expertise of Jean-Pierre Issa, M.D., professor in the Department of Leukemia. Epigenetics involves the biochemical regulation of genes rather than actual damage to or mutation of DNA. Issa and colleagues were instrumental in the development of decitabine, one of the first epigenetic drugs, which turns on genes that have been chemically shut down.

"Our plans are to find markers that can guide individualized epigenetic therapy by identifying patients most likely to respond and we will start in leukemia, primarily at M. D. Anderson," Issa says. 

Research to translate results in leukemia to solid tumors such as breast, colon and lung will be done at other Dream Team institutions. Scientists at Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Southern California lead the team. 

Clinical trials of new epigenetic drugs will be conducted jointly at USC and M. D. Anderson.

Roy Herbst, M.D., Ph.D., professor in the Department of Thoracic/Head and Neck Medical Oncology, brings the department's innovative BATTLE clinical trial to a Dream Team applying a technology that detects circulating tumor cells in the bloodstream to detect specific mutations in a variety of cancers and predict patients' responses to treatment.  

The BATTLE program uses biomarkers to guide treatment for late-stage lung cancer patients, relying on tumor biopsies to detect relevant mutations. "We hope circulating tumor cells will allow us to do the same thing without having to do a biopsy," Herbst says. "We would be able to conduct continuous sampling with this technology. We're excited to be collaborating on this project."

Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center and Harvard Medical School lead the team.

Looking for a fun outing to celebrate Mother's Day and raise research funds to fight a deadly cancer in women?

M. D. Anderson's 12th annual Sprint for Life Run/Walk and Sprint for Spouts Kids' Runs on Saturday, May 9 -- the day before Mother's Day -- is the ideal family-friendly event with something for everyone. The starting lines for the adult and kid races, post-race party, survivors reception area and awards ceremony will be based outside the Mays Clinic building at 1200 Holcombe. The race routes wind around the Texas Medical Center.

Benefiting M. D. Anderson's Blanton-Davis Ovarian Cancer Research Program, the 5K run/walk will begin at 7:30 a.m. with the Sprint for Sprouts non-competitive races for children 12 years and younger beginning at 9:00 a.m.



The first kids' race is the Tot Trot for children age 3 and younger, who will run about 150 feet. The second race is the 1K for all children 12 and under who want to run the full race. For the first time, Sprint for Life will offer a competitive 5K run using a disposable timing tag attached to the runners' shoes.

For caregivers, patients, families, friends and survivors who want to support ovarian cancer research at M. D. Anderson but who can't attend the event, there's an opportunity to "Sprint in Spirit." These special Spirit Sprinters will receive a T-shirt, shoelaces and race numbers and have their names posted at the event.

Proceeds from the event benefit the Blanton-Davis Ovarian Cancer Research Program at M. D. Anderson. In its 11 years, Sprint for Life has raised more than $2 million for the program's innovative ovarian cancer research.

To register for the race or to learn more about Sprint for Life, please click on 

http://www.mdanderson.org/Featured_Sites/Sprintforlife/.

Professor of Experimental Therapeutics Kapil Mehta earned one of four pilot grants awarded this year by the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network (PANCAN) and the American Association for Cancer Research.

The $195,870 two-year grant supports Mehta's ongoing inquiry into how overexpression of tissue transglutaminase (TG2) promotes pancreatic cancer drug resistance and metastasis.

He and other awardees were honored Tuesday night at the AACR Research Grants Dinner at its annual meeting in Denver.

Mehta has connected overexpression of the gene to treatment resistance and metastasis in pancreatic and breast cancer and melanoma.  Mehta and colleagues have shown that expression of TG2 can be shut down with a targeted small-interfering RNA (siRNA).

National Cancer Institute Director John Niederhuber, M.D., described the institute's plans and priorities for the $1.3 billion it will receive over two years from President Obama's stimulus plan and  for a 3 percent increase in its baseline budget. He addressed the American Association for Cancer Research 100th Annual Meeting 2009. A text copy is available.

Higher RO1 Grant Payline

Using the budget increase for FY 2009, the payline for RO1 grants will rise from last year's 12th percentile (grant must score in top 12 percent to be funded) to the 16th percentile. Coordinated but separate use of stimulus and budget funds will raise it to the 25th percentile.

The payline for young investigators will rise concurrently.

Start-Up Grants

NCI is planning to fund early stage start-up packages to help young faculty members establish their labs.  Physician-scientists and Ph.D.s who are committed to translational research will receive the grants.

Three Signature Initiatives

Niederhuber discussed three central projects:  expansion of The Cancer Genome Atlas, establishment of a personalized cancer care platform to better move "from data, to function, to target, to therapy," and start up of a network of Physical Sciences-Oncology Centers to explore new approaches by better connecting physical sciences to cancer biology.

A webcast of speech will be posted around 2 p.m. CDT (after the speech).