VCU team wins prestigious cancer research award

By Lorraine Cichowski and Steven Grant

RICHMOND, Va. – A team of researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University's School of Medicine and Massey Cancer Center has won one of this year's highly competitive Translational-Clinical Awards from The V Foundation for Cancer Research to continue its ground-breaking work on novel treatments for blood cancers.

The team will receive $100,000 per year for three years and matching funds from VCU to explore a novel treatment for hematologic malignancies, primarily leukemia, lymphoma and multiple myeloma.  The researchers are developing and testing a strategy to target cancer cells with a combination of experimental drugs that includes a class of compounds known as proteasome inhibitors, which interfere with the ability of tumor cells to degrade unwanted proteins, and the cell-cycle inhibitor Flavopiridol, which blocks cancer cell progression through the cell cycle.

The team includes Steven Grant, M.D., principal investigator of the study and Shirley Carter and Sture Gordon Olsson Professor of Oncology; Paul Dent, Ph.D., associate professor of radiation oncology and Universal Inc. Professor in Signal Transduction Research, and John D. Roberts, M.D., professor of internal medicine and associate director of clinical research at the Massey Cancer Center.

"The importance of this work stems from the fact that it represents one of the first efforts to test the activity of a strategy combining two targeted agents that act by interrupting key signaling and cell cycle pathways in cancer cells. As such, it represents a radical departure from previous anti-cancer approaches involving the combination of chemotherapy drugs, which tend to be more non-selective in their actions," said Grant.

V Foundation is a charitable organization created in 1993 by ESPN and Jim Valvano, the legendary North Carolina State University basketball coach and ESPN broadcaster who died that year at 47 after a brief battle with metastic adenocarcinoma – inoperable cancer that had spread through his body before it was discovered.  In the past decade, the foundation has raised more than $30 million and awarded 190 grants for essential cancer research.  From 1998-2000, VCU's Dent was the recipient of a two-year V Scholar grant for basic cancer research.  

V Foundation's Translational-Clinical Grant Program supports teams of basic and clinical investigators carrying out research that has imminent potential for translation into the clinic. Like the V Scholar program for individual researchers, the Translational-Clinical Grant Program is very competitive. Each year, V Foundation invites the nation's 61 National Cancer Institute-designated cancer centers, which include VCU's Massey Cancer Center, to nominate researchers for funding consideration. Other prominent cancer centers and institutions also may apply for funding. 

In addition to VCU, the two other recipients of V Foundation Translational-Clinical Awards for 2003 are St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., and USC/Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center and Hospital in Los Angeles. 

Grant and his colleagues at VCU are involved in various laboratory studies and National Cancer Institute-sponsored clinical trials to test new classes of anti-cancer drugs and combinations of drugs that target and disrupt the cell cycle and survival signaling pathways in cancer cells.