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.
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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2010 GRANTEE
W. Kimryn Rathmell, M.D., Ph.D.Assistant Professor, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Lineberger Cancer Center, Chapel Hill, NC
Advancing Prognostic Algorithms for Renal Cell Carcinoma
"Renal cell carcinoma is a cancer for which curative options are currently limited to the early surgical management of cases. However, new treatment options are rapidly emerging which may bring high impact multimodality therapeutic options for treatment to improve cure rates beyond that of the initial surgery. Because of this, current risk factor algorithms based on stage, tumor grade and clinical performance status, are inadequate to assess risk for disease recurrence or death from kidney cancer. Modern molecular algorithms are needed which will assist in defining the genetic or molecular differences between subtypes of clear cell renal cell carcinoma as well as aid in the prognosis of renal cell carcinoma to permit clinicians to determine how best to treat individual patients. We have recently identified a biomarker panel indicative of the underlying biology of the disease, which we have called ccA and ccB, which correlates tightly with outcomes. ccA patients survive a median of eight years, whereas ccB patients survive a median of two years and represent the patients who have the most to gain from highly aggressive initial therapy. This study represents a major effort to develop a clinically relevant renal cell carcinoma molecular tool which can influence clinical practice in the immediate future. Clinical decisions to use combined modality therapies, ablative therapies or intensive observation for disease recurrence are in dire need of a robust and reliable indicator of clinical outcome for the majority of patients."
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