MEET THE SU2C DREAM TEAMS

Meet the SU2C Dream Teams

Last May you helped launch Stand Up To Cancer, a groundbreaking initiative funding translational cancer research with the aim of getting promising new therapies from the bench to the bedside – and doing it fast. (You can read more about translational research here.) Thanks to your incredible generosity and support, SU2C has raised over $100 million in the short twelve months since its launch. But this is only the beginning.

We’re thrilled to announce that our Scientific Advisory Committee has selected its first round of grant recipients. SU2C’s 2009 Dream Teams will bring together over 300 leading researchers, clinicians and patient advocates from institutions all over the world. Collectively, they represent some of the brightest minds working in the field today. And we think you’ll find the science behind their projects as exciting and inspiring as we do.

The First Stand Up To Cancer Scientific Dream Teams

Bringing Epigenetic Therapy to the Forefront of Cancer Management

Leader: Stephen Baylin, M.D., Deputy Director of the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center

Co-Leader: Peter Jones, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor of Urology and Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, University of Southern California

Epigenetic therapy is one of the most promising new areas of cancer research; this Dream Team hopes to finally bring it into clinical practice. Focusing on an array of cancers, the team will examine an epigenetic process known as DNA de-methylation, which inactivates or “silences” cancer stem cells. Then they’ll develop a clinical trial to test the effects of a new drug that could effectively inhibit the epigenetic changes that lead to cancer.

“Your DNA is like a hard drive,” Jones said. “You’ve got all the information in it to read out and do everything you can do with it, but without packaging and without sufficient software you can’t instruct that DNA when to do X and when to do Y and Z. Cancers mutate the DNA and can thus corrupt the hard drive; but the package can also go wrong. Fortunately, the packaging is more reversible than trying to do something about an actual mutation. We can do things to bring that cell back into normal balance.”

Targeting the PI3K Pathway in Women’s Cancers

Leader: Lewis C. Cantley, Ph.D., Chief of the Division of Signal Transduction at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center

Co-Leaders: Charles Sawyers, M.D., Director of the Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and Gordon B. Mills, M.D., Ph.D., Chair, Department of Systems Biology, University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center

The PI3K pathway helps regulate cell survival and growth – but mutations in this pathway can trigger cancer. This Dream Team, run by the scientists who first discovered the pathway and determined its role in cancer development, will focus on three women’s cancers that all have the PI3K mutation: breast, ovarian and endometrial. Their goal is to find a way to predict which patients respond positively to PI3K inhibitors, accelerating the potential of personalized cancer treatment.

“An analogy I like to make is that if you have a problem with one of the electrical circuits in your house and you want to turn off the circuit breaker so you can fix it, and you don’t know the wiring diagram of your house, you would be going to the basement, flipping things off and then back to the third floor a dozen times or more before you get the right answer,” said Sawyers. “If you have a wiring diagram, which is what we have been working on for the last 20 years or so, then you can make an educated guess--this is the circuit breaker, this should work for this event. Then when the patient comes in, we can test them and if see a particular event, we can say, this is the drug for you.”

An Integrated Approach to Targeting Molecular Breast Cancer Molecular Subtypes and Their “Resistance” Phenotypes