STAND UP TO CANCER, Cancer Research UK and the Lustgarten Foundation selected members for a Dream Team focused on pancreatic cancer.
Daniel Von Hoff, physician-in-chief and distinguished professor at the Translational Genomics Research Institute in Phoenix, chief scientific officer at HonorHealth, and professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic, will lead the team—with Ronald Evans, professor and director of the Gene Expression Laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, and Gerard Evan, professor and chair of the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, serving as co-leaders.
Stand Up To Cancer, Cancer Research UK, and The Lustgarten Foundation are providing $12 million in funding over three years. The team was announced during the 2015 International Conference on Molecular Targets and Cancer Therapeutics sponsored by the American Association for Cancer Research, NCI, and the European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer. The AACR is SU2C’s Scientific Partner and will administer the grant.
Serving as principal investigators on the team are lead investigator Christopher Heeschen, of the Centre for Stem Cells in Cancer and Ageing at the Barts Cancer Institute at Queen Mary University of London; David Propper, a consultant medical oncologist at Barts Cancer Institute and the London NHS Trust; and Joshua Rabinowitz, professor of chemistry and integrative genomics at Princeton University.
The team also includes more than two dozen other researchers based in the U.S. and the U.K., and two advocates, Suzanne Berenger of England and Howard Young of the U.S., both of whom are pancreatic cancer survivors.
The dream team aims to develop new approaches to reset malfunctioning SEs in pancreatic tumors, increasing sensitivity to chemotherapy and to anticancer immune cells.
