all Levi Garraway stories

Nine Harvard faculty members win NIH’s Pioneer, Innovator Awards

404132862 — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 16:16:46 -0400

Nine Harvard researchers "well-positioned to make significant - and potentially transformative - discoveries in a variety of areas," ranging from brain development to reprogramming stem cells, have been awarded special funding by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The grants, announced Tuesday (Sept. 18), total $15 million over the next five years. They will be distributed through two NIH grant programs, both overseen by NIH Director Elias Zerhouni. One, the NIH Director's Pioneer Award, funds established researchers with $2.5 million each. The second, the Director's New Innovator Award, gives $1.5 million each to young, promising investigators.

Practical way to target cancer cell mutations demonstrated

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 11:53:45 -0400

A study led by researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University provides the first demonstration of a practical method of screening tumors for cancer-related gene abnormalities that might be treated with "targeted" drugs.

The findings, published online Feb. 11 on the Nature Genetics Web site, may help relieve a bottleneck between scientists' expanding knowledge of the genetic mutations associated with cancer and the still-nascent ability of doctors to use that knowledge to benefit patients. The results constitute an important step toward the era of "personalized medicine," in which cancer therapy will be guided by the particular set of genetic mutations within each patient's tumor, the authors suggest.

"It's universally recognized that cancer is a disease of the genome, of mutations within genes responsible for cell growth and survival, and a great deal of effort has gone into finding those mutations, to the point where several hundred to a thousand are now known," said the study's senior author, Levi Garraway, of Dana-Farber and the Broad Institute. "The challenge has been how to determine which of them are involved in each of the hundreds of kinds of cancer that occur in humans - and to develop accurate, affordable methods of detecting key mutations in tumor samples. This study suggests that such a method is feasible on a large scale."

The authors took advantage of a scientific serendipity to devise a simple test to detect important cancer mutations. Mutations in oncogenes (genes linked to cancer) do not occur randomly; rather, they seem to arise most frequently in certain regions of the oncogenes. As a result, researchers didn't necessarily have to scan the entire length of each gene, but could focus instead on the sections most likely to harbor mutations.

Major funding for the study was provided by grants from Genentech, Inc. the American Cancer Society, the National Cancer Institute, the Prostate Cancer Foundation, the Burroughs-Wellcome Fund, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Novartis Institute for Biomedical Research.

Scientists identify normal gene driving the growth and survival of melanoma cells

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:21:27 -0400

Dana-Farber's Levi Garraway, M.D., Ph.D., and William Sellers, M.D., the paper's first and senior authors, and their colleagues reported their findings in the July 7, 2005 issue of the journal Nature.

The researchers used single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) array technology, which focuses on the building blocks of individual genes, to identify regions of chromosomes where genes were either left out or multiplied over and over - mistakes that are often associated with cancer.

When they checked the treatment outcomes of the patients from whom they took tumor samples, researchers found poorer five- year survival rates among patients whose metasases contained the overcopied or "amplified" MITF gene.

Abnormal amplification of the MITF gene was found to be associated with other genetic changes as well. They included mutations in a gene, BRAF, previously found in melanoma cells, and silencing of p16, a "tumor-suppressor" gene that normally keeps cells from dividing too rapidly and causing cancer.

Aside from its clinical potential, the scientists say the finding advances the understanding of cancer: It highlights that while MITF normally regulates the development of the skin's pigment- producing cells, too much MITF spurs these melanocytes to grow malignant.