Stand Up To Cancer

Stand Up To Cancer and the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), its scientific partner, congratulate Dream Team Co-Leader Charles L. Sawyers on winning the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award for groundbreaking work on the treatment of chronic myeloid leukemia. Sawyers, along with colleagues Brian J. Druker, a member of the SU2C Scientific Advisory Committee, and Nicholas B. Lydon share this award, which is among the most respected science prizes in the world and is being presented today at a ceremony at the Pierre Hotel in New York City.

Druker and Lydon's research led to the development of Gleevec. Sawyers' research spearheaded efforts toward combating the resistance to Gleevec that arises in some patients. The team's discoveries converted chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) from a nearly always fatal cancer to a largely manageable condition. Gleevec has revolutionized the world of cancer drug discovery and therapy by its mode of action, which specifically targets a cancer-causing molecule, killing abnormal cells and avoiding damage to normal cells. Rather than aiming at rapidly proliferating cells and provoking toxic side effects, as standard chemotherapeutic agents do, the awardees stymied the single rogue enzyme that triggers CML -- a tactic that most scientists predicted would fail.

Sawyers co-leads, along with Dr. Gordon B. Mills and Dream Team Leader Dr. Lewis C. Cantley, the project "Targeting PI3K in Women's Cancers." The project focuses on frequent mutations that occur in a set of genes that regulate the PI3K pathway, which is a complex signaling cascade that, in concert with other signaling networks, regulates cell survival and growth. A number of drugs to inhibit this pathway have been developed and currently are in clinical trials. However, as with other "targeted" therapies, only a fraction of patients who enroll in these trials benefit, and it is not possible to predict which patients will respond positively. This means that many women will be given treatments that have no benefit to them or could cause unnecessary complications. The goal of this Dream Team is to discover approaches that will predict which patients will respond positively to PI3K inhibitors. If successful, this will accelerate personalized cancer treatment that can be incorporated into standard practice.

Dr. Sawyers is the Director of the Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center; Dr. Druker is a Professor of Medicine at the Oregon Health Sciences University Cancer Institute; Dr. Cantley is Chief of the Division of Signal Transduction at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center; Dr. Mills is Chair of the Department of Systems Biology at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.