AACR Team Science Award

The Johns Hopkins Pancreatic Cancer Sequencing Team

Seventh Annual Team Science Award Recipients

Johns Hopkins Cancer Pancreatic Cancer Sequencing Team

in the Sol Goldman Pancreatic Cancer

Research Center at Johns Hopkins University

Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, MD

The team members received their awards at the AACR Annual Meeting 2013 in Washington, D.C. The award presentation was held during the AACR Opening Ceremony on Sunday, April 7, 2013. Visit the AACR Annual Meeting 2013 page for more information.

View the list of all prior winning teams.

The Award

Unparalleled opportunities now exist to detect, diagnose, prevent and more effectively treat cancer due to the sequencing of the human genome, progress in systems biology and the advancement of computer science and other technologies. Capitalizing on these opportunities often depends on the participation of researchers in specialties that include chemistry, physics, engineering, computational science and nanotechnology. The integration of such specialties into cancer and biomedical research form the bases of interdisciplinary scientific teams.

This award has been established by the American Association for Cancer Research and Eli Lilly and Company to acknowledge and catalyze the growing importance of interdisciplinary teams to the understanding of cancer and/or the translation of research discoveries into clinical cancer applications. Proactive interaction between academic and industry researchers is particularly crucial to continue progress and accelerate drug development.

In addition, through the presentation of this award, the AACR and Eli Lilly seek to affect change within the traditional cancer research culture by recognizing those institutions that value and foster interdisciplinary team science. These institutions will have demonstrated their support of a team science environment by creating mechanisms to enhance the required infrastructure, such as through pilot funding, technology transfer offices, shared resources, etc., and by presenting awards, honors, appointments and promotions to those who participate in interdisciplinary teams.

The AACR Team Science Award will recognize an outstanding interdisciplinary research team for its innovative and meritorious science that has advanced or likely will advance our fundamental knowledge of cancer or a team that has applied existing knowledge to advance the detection, diagnosis, prevention or treatment of cancer.

The team selected to receive the Seventh Annual AACR Team Science Award was collectively awarded a prize of $50,000 and recognized during the AACR Annual Meeting 2013 in Washington, DC, USA (April 6-10, 2013). The representative institutions were cited at the AACR Annual Meeting for their leadership role in fostering team science.

Eligibility Criteria

For the purpose of this award, a team is comprised of independent faculty-level researchers providing complementary interdisciplinary expertise, each of whom have made separate substantive and quantifiable contributions to the research being recognized.
Team members may be working within the same institution or at several institutions; however, if researchers are in the same institution, they must have clearly separate funding and research space.
The research to be recognized should reflect work toward a specific scientific goal that otherwise would not be realized by any single component of the team.
Candidacy is open to all cancer researchers who are affiliated with any institution involved in cancer research, cancer medicine or cancer-related biomedical science anywhere in the world. Such institutions include those in academia, industry or government.
Teams comprising academic and industry researchers will be accepted.

Nomination Procedure and Instructions

Nominations are closed.

Nominations may be made by any scientist, whether an AACR member or nonmember, who is now or has been affiliated with any institution involved in cancer research, cancer medicine or cancer-related biomedical science.

Selection

Nominations of teams will be considered by an Award Selection Committee of international cancer leaders appointed by the president of the AACR. After careful deliberations by the Award Selection Committee, its recommendations will be forwarded to the Executive Committee of the AACR for final consideration and decision. Selection of the Team Science Award winners will be made on the basis of the criteria listed above. No regard will be given to age, race, gender, nationality, geographic location or religious or political views.

Questions?

Linda Stokes, Program Associate
awards@aacr.org

American Association for Cancer Research
17th Floor, 615 Chestnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19106-4404
(215) 446-7128

SPOTLIGHT

Sixth Annual Team Science Award Recipients

The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) and Royal Marsden Hospital:

Cancer Research UK Cancer Therapeutics Unit & Drug Development Unit Team

The team members received their awards from Dr. Richard Gaynor, Eli Lilly representative and Dr. Eric Rubin, Selection Committee chairperson during the AACR Opening Ceremony at the AACR Annual Meeting 2012 in Chicago, Ill.

The AACR Team Science Award recognizes an outstanding interdisciplinary research team for its innovative and meritorious science that has advanced or likely will advance our fundamental knowledge of cancer or a team that has applied existing knowledge to advance the detection, diagnosis, prevention or treatment of cancer.

The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) and Royal Marsden Hospital: Cancer Research UK Cancer Therapeutics Unit & Drug Development Unit Team are recognized for their tremendous impact in the preclinical discovery and clinical development of innovative cancer therapeutics. The team, comprising experts in cancer biology, pharmacology, medicinal chemistry and medical oncology, was responsible with its academic and industrial partners for the discovery of 16 drug development candidates over the past six years. Six of these candidates entered clinical trials, including highly promising inhibitors of androgen biosynthesis (CYP17), heat shock protein 90, phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase, protein kinase B/AKT and cyclin-dependent kinases. The team also carried out pioneering preclinical work on BRAF and its inhibitors and discovered CHK1 and dual Aurora/FLT3 inhibitors.

The team’s development of abiraterone, an inhibitor of CYP17A1, as a new treatment for hormone-refractory prostate cancer is an outstanding example of how a highly functioning translational team can rapidly convert a biologic hypothesis into a new cancer therapeutic. As a result of evidence of continued nuclear steroid receptor signaling in hormone-refractory prostate cancer tissues, the team hypothesized that blockade of androgen biosynthesis would be effective in hormone-refractory prostate cancer patients due to continued nuclear steroid receptor signaling. Chemists in the team synthesized and identified abiraterone as a potent inhibitor of CYP17A-mediated androgen biosynthesis.

Clinical members of the team then took abiraterone through initial phase I and II studies, which demonstrated impressive antitumor activity with excellent tolerability. Subsequently, in partnership with a biotechnology company, the team was involved in the multinational phase III study that demonstrated a survival advantage of four months for abiraterone over the placebo control group in patients with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer who had received previous chemotherapy. On the basis of this study, abiraterone was approved for the treatment of metastatic, hormone-refractory prostate cancer patients by the U.S. FDA, Health Canada and the European Medicines Agency.

The work carried out by this multidisciplinary team over the last six years provides an outstanding example of the nonprofit cancer drug discovery and development model that they have pioneered, as well as exemplifying a meritorious ability to collaborate productively with industry to accelerate patient benefit.