4/6/10 A new generation of researchers is setting its sights on cancer cells’ bizarre and seemingly inefficient metabolism, which appears to be tightly linked to many of the genes already implicated in cancer. Recent discoveries suggest that cancer cells reprogram their energy-generating pathways to create the building blocks they need to grow and divide out of control, wasting a great deal of energy in the process. Potential drugs that block this pathway could offer a new way to treat a range of cancers, says Matthew Vander Heiden, assistant professor of biology and member of the Koch Institute.

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4/5/10  KI's Paula T. Hammond was honored as Scientist of the Year at the Harvard Foundation’s Albert Einstein Science Conference last Friday. Hammond, a chemical engineer, said the conference was particularly significant to her because of the time she spent at Harvard as a postdoctoral researcher and as a Radcliffe Institute Fellow. Hammond commented on how being both a minority and a woman scientist has affected her work.   “This is one of those things that you carry with you, and you really just make it a point not to [let it] be a barrier,” she said.  She spoke about the importance of mentors and positive guidance, citing how her parents instilled in her a can-do attitude.

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3/15/10   The world’s “hottest” researcher is KI member and biochemist Rudolf Jaenisch. He is joined by scientists scattered from Ann Arbor to Osaka on the annual Thomson Reuters list of the world’s 12 hottest researchers.  In its March/April issue of Science Watch, Thomson Reuters identified the dozen authors whose recent papers were cited most often by other researchers during 2009. Jaenisch authored 14 of these Hot Papers. His research investigates the potential utility of reprogrammed stems cells in several diseases including cancer. Eric Lander, co-founder of the Broad Institute and member of the KI was also included in the list of "hottest researchers". 

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3/10/10   Eric S. Lander, founding director of the Broad Institute and member of the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Reserch, is one of three winners of the Albany Medical Center Prize in Biomedical Research, a $500,000 prize awarded this year for advances that led to mapping the human genome. Lander heads the Broad Institute, a Cambridge genetics research center, and is co-chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. He shares the prize with Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, and David Botstein, director of the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University.  James J. Barba, president and chief executive of the Albany Medical Center, said the scientists were being honored as "initiators of a genuine revolution" in understanding the nature and origins of human disease.

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4/10   A number of protein "readout molecules" provide KI member Forest White,  with information that he hopes will lead to new pharmaceuticals that could inform new treatment approaches for the most common type of adult brain tumor, glioblastoma.  “One of the big problems is that tumors — especially glioblastoma — can become rapidly resistant to therapy,” White says. “By looking at tumors from many different patients, we can see which signaling networks are most commonly activated in the most aggressive tumors and identify points in the cellular signaling network that we would want to inhibit.”  Disrupting the network could make tumors less aggressive or wipe them out altogether, while elucidating signaling cascades also could result in early cancer diagnosis and a means of tracking how the disease is progressing over time.

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