The Landon Foundation-AACR INNOVATOR Award for Research in Personalized Cancer Medicine represents a joint effort between the Landon Foundation and the AACR to accelerate progress in the area of personalized medicine by providing support for a physician-scientist who conducts meritorious studies that hold promise for near-patient benefit.
2012 GRANTEE
Sameek Roychowdhury, M.D., Ph.D.Assistant Professor, Comprehensive Cancer Center, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH
Mechanisms of Resistance in Prostate Cancer Through Integrative Sequencing
"Prostate cancer is the most common type of cancer in men and the second leading cause of cancer death in men in the United States. While there has been significant progress in the treatment of prostate cancer, several challenges persist such as a means to match patients with targeted therapies and understanding mechanisms of resistance. The recent surge of high-throughput sequencing of cancer genomes has led to an expanding molecular classification of prostate cancer. These approaches have the potential to identify aberrant pathways and characterize mechanisms of resistance for patients receiving matching molecularly targeted therapies in clinical trials. However, these sequencing strategies have yet to be systematically applied for individual patients with prostate cancer in real time. In this proposal, we delineate individual tumor molecular portraits for advanced prostate cancer patients considering clinical trials, and determine mechanisms of resistance for individual patients with castrate-resistant prostate cancer who progress on targeted therapies. This includes the development of a multi-disciplinary Sequencing Tumor Board to interpret results and leverage expertise in targeted therapies. This proposal brings integrative sequencing to clinical prostate cancer research with goal of delivering personalized or precision cancer care. The broader impact of this study includes the general application of high-throughput sequencing for clinical trials in oncology."
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2011 GRANTEE
Jason T. Huse, M.D., Ph.D.Assistant Attending, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY
Personalizing PI3K/AKT Pathway Inhibitor in Malignant Glioma
“Recent work has clearly demonstrated that malignant glioma, the most common and aggressive brain cancer in adults, is most likely a collection of multiple related diseases, each caused by its own characteristic molecular abnormalities. Optimizing treatment regimens for each variant will require the addition of more sophisticated molecular assays to standard diagnostic workflows within pathology departments across the country. This proposal aims to refine and apply an innovative molecular test panel, operative from standard material collected from brain tumor surgery. We are focused in particular on the so-called PI3K/AKT signaling pathway, a molecular network that has been repeatedly implicated in the biology of malignant glioma. By integrating a variety of experimental methods in our panel to evaluate levels of specific genes, RNA transcripts and proteins, we will stratify more than 200 cases of malignant glioma by PI3K/AKT pathway activation status and make further correlations with other molecular findings in these tumors. We will also translate our studies to direct patient care by employing our molecular profiling techniques in the context of clinical trials testing PI3K/AKT pathway inhibitors in malignant glioma. Thus, the goals of our proposal are firmly grounded in the development and application of the molecular pathology infrastructure necessary for personalized care advancement in Neuro-oncology.”
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