Two scientists honored with Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation awards
By Carol Marie Cropper
Two UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers have received awards from the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation, an organization that supports promising early-career cancer scientists.
Dr. Elise Jeffery, a postdoctoral researcher at the Children’s Medical Center Research Institute (CRI) at UT Southwestern, will receive $231,000 over the next four years as one of 17 Damon Runyon Fellows selected in 2016. The fellowships are awarded to outstanding postdoctoral scientists conducting basic and translational cancer research in the laboratories of leading senior investigators.
Dr. Deepak Nijhawan, Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine and Biochemistry, received a $450,000, three-year award as a Damon Runyon Clinical Investigator in 2013. In July, the Foundation awarded Dr. Nijhawan a $300,000, two-year continuation grant to further his research focused on a molecule that kills cancer cells.
The Clinical Investigator grant, awarded to early-career physician-scientists conducting patient-oriented cancer research at major research centers, helped support Dr. Nijhawan’s work on the small molecule CD437, a promising cancer drug lead. This molecule, a synthetic retinoid similar to vitamin A, is toxic to cancer cells but not normal cells, said Dr. Nijhawan, who earned his M.D./Ph.D. through UT Southwestern’s Medical Scientist Training Program in 2005. Since the 1990s, scientists had known CD437 killed cancer, but no one could determine how the molecule worked, and therefore no potential treatments ever resulted, he said.
In May, Dr. Nijhawan and fellow UT Southwestern researchers published findings in Nature Chemical Biology outlining how CD437 binds to POLA1, a protein that is key to initiating DNA replication in cells. The study showed that cancer cells treated with CD437 could not multiply, and therefore died.
With the continuation grant, Dr. Nijhawan – whose mentor has been Dr. Steven McKnight, Chairman of Biochemistry – said he will work to refine CD437 so that it can be tested in mouse cancer models.
Dr. Jeffery is studying cancer from a different angle. Her focus is on a growth factor produced by bone marrow stromal cells that could lead to a new treatment to better repair marrow damaged by radiation and chemotherapy.
After radiation or chemotherapy, cancer patients often have compromised immune systems since damaged bone marrow can’t produce enough white blood cells, she explained. Dr. Jeffery is investigating whether a protein secreted by stromal cells can improve the recovery process.
Dr. Jeffery works in the laboratory of Dr. Sean Morrison, CRI at UTSW Director, Professor of Pediatrics, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator at UT Southwestern. He called her “smart, highly motivated, and careful.
“I expect big things from her. The Damon Runyon award is one of the most prestigious postdoctoral fellowships,” Dr. Morrison said. “Receiving this means that Elise is viewed as one of the most promising new postdoctoral fellows in the country.”
Dr. Jeffery, who began her work at the Medical Center in November 2015 after earning a Ph.D. in cell biology at Yale University, said she became fascinated by stem cells in graduate school. She said bone marrow stem cells are particularly interesting because they make fat and bone cells as well as regulate blood stem cells.
In high school, Dr. Jeffery thought of becoming an artist – then she took a chemistry class and fell in love with science. “You really do have to be creative in science, and so I think that having that side of my brain working too helps,” she said.
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Dr. McKnight holds the Distinguished Chair in Basic Biomedical Research, and The Sam G. Winstead and F. Andrew Bell Distinguished Chair in Biochemistry.
Dr. Morrison holds the Kathryne and Gene Bishop Distinguished Chair in Pediatric Research at Children’s Research Institute at UT Southwestern, and the Mary McDermott Cook Chair in Pediatric Genetics.
