IN THEIR WORDS: AN EVENING WITH THE DREAM TEAMS

On September 1, 2009, Stand Up To Cancer held a dinner preceding a day of meetings with its Dream Teams and Executive Leadership Council. The meal was an opportunity for some of SU2C's leaders to meet the visionaries behind the exciting translational science we are helping to fund. One by one, the Dream Teams took the podium to describe, in their words, their projects and their hopes for the future of cancer research.

We want to share with you some of what we learned that evening. First, Laura Ziskin, SU2C co-founder and member of the ELC, took a moment to describe the collaboration SU2C's Dream Team model aims to engender. "No one cancer organization or group, no one institution, no one scientist, not even the government is going to make a dent in the enormous riddle that is cancer," she said. "It is only by our coming together that we have a chance of impacting this disease in our lifetime. And the requirement of success is going to be your absolute unwavering commitment to work together. You are a group of teams. But you are, in fact, one team."

With those words still ringing in their ears, the Dream Teams each took a moment to talk about their work. First up was Stephen Baylin, MD, from the project Bringing Epigenetic Therapy to the Forefront of Cancer Management.

"This is, in a sense, a magnificent experiment," Baylin said. "But we have to remember the real heroes of this experiment: the patients. Because they’re the ones that really will collaborate with us to try to get this done. So: what is epigenetics? Genes in cancer can be damaged in at least two ways. One is to damage the hard drive that makes that gene. That’s the DNA. The hypothesis we have is that we can reverse abnormalities in the packaging that occurs in cancer and restore genes that would be so-called tumor suppressors. So this is where we’re starting. We've had some exceptional very early success in patients with advanced lung cancer who have failed previous therapies, and that’s about as difficult a challenge and starting point as you can get. And we have some responses that we’ve been terribly surprised by. Our challenge now is how far can we take this? How many patients? What subsets of patients with lung cancer will there be? Can we use it in other stages of the disease -- early disease? Can we extrapolate this to colon and breast cancer? And this is what we seek to do."

Lewis Cantley, PhD, spoke on behalf of his team, Targeting the PI3K Pathway in Women's Cancers. He told the assembled group, "I’m so excited about this pathway. I’ve been working on it for 20 years. We've managed to pull out information from 2,000 tumors -- breast cancers, endometrial cancers, ovarian cancers. And we found, as we already suspected, that each of these cancers had not just the mutation in the PI3K pathway, but additional mutations in other pathways. It's probably true that no two breast cancer patients in American have exactly the same mutations going on, and that’s a sobering thought, but it also shows that many of them have very common mutations. And so our goal is to collect that data on every patient that goes into a clinical trial with these kinds of targeted agents and determine who’s likely to respond. That will dramatically accelerate the approval of the drugs. But we also realize that no single drug is gonna cure cancer. We'll need drug combinations. And the drug combinations will have to be selected logically based on what we understand about the pathway. So that’s what we’re attempting to do. It's an incredibly exciting opportunity."

Joe Gray, PhD, offered a few words on his and Dennis Slamon’s, MD, PhD, team's project, An Integrated Approach to Targeting Molecular Breast Cancer Molecular Subtypes and Their 'Resistance' Phenotypes. "I think that one of the things that Stand Up to Cancer has done is to really galvanize the entire community to think bigger and faster then we have in the past," he noted. "What this has done is it’s given us a team of the breast cancer clinician scientists in the country looking at all aspects of breast cancer. We're applying the latest molecular analysis technologies to try to understand what the bones are that make up these cancers and how it is that we can actually begin to tailor the drugs that are available to individual patients. This requires management of a huge amount of data, and we’ve got some of the best people in computational biology and mathematics in the country to help us put all of this stuff together. We understand more and more about the biological basis of this disease. I think that this process has brought us to the point where we have a team that can quickly and boldly make a difference in breast cancer."