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Damon Runyon Alumnus Ardem Patapoutian, PhD, of Scripps Research, was awarded the 2020 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience for his breakthrough discovery of sensory receptors that respond to pressure. This award recognizes outstanding achievement in advancing our knowledge and understanding of the brain and nervous system.
Damon Runyon-Rachleff Innovator Rushika M. Perera, PhD, at University of the California, San Francisco, and colleagues at NYU Grossman School of Medicine have discovered that pancreatic cancer cells can appropriate an internal waste removal process to dispose of tags (MHC-1) on their surfaces which trigger the immune system to destroy tumors.
Since COVID-19 cases escalated to pandemic levels worldwide, Damon Runyon scientists are contributing to the unprecedented global effort to stop the disease by investigating how this specific coronavirus enters human cells, developing more efficient testing and searching for a treatment.
Seven Damon Runyon alumni were elected to the National Academy of Sciences (the science “Hall of Fame”), one of the highest honors that can be given to a U.S. scientist. This brings the total number of Damon Runyon scientists who are members of the National Academy of Sciences to 86.
Damon Runyon-Gordon Family Clinical Investigator Geoffrey R. Oxnard, MD; Board Member Michael V. Seiden, MD, PhD; and colleagues published results of a new blood test that can detect more than 50 types of cancer, often before symptoms develop. This may give patients and doctors a huge advantage and opportunity to treat the disease before it reaches advanced stages.
Damon Runyon Board Member Elaine V. Fuchs, PhD, the Rebecca C. Lancefield Professor of Mammalian Cell Biology and Development at The Rockefeller University, has received the 2020 Canada Gairdner Award in recognition of her pioneering work on tissue stem cells, the cells of our tissues that are responsible for repairing wounds.
After decades of trying, scientists developed drugs that target one of the most elusive cancer-causing proteins, KRAS, which is activated in nearly a third of cancers, including difficult to treat lung and colorectal cancers. In 2016, Piro Lito, MD, PhD, (Damon Runyon Clinical Investigator ‘17-’20) and his colleagues at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center showed that a compound could shut down the most common form of the KRAS mutation in lung cancer without harming healthy cells.
Omar Abdel-Wahab, MD (Damon Runyon Clinical Investigator ‘13-‘16), from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and Adrian R. Krainer, PhD, from Cold Spring Harbor, collaborated to uncover how a genetic mutation can cause RNA messages to be blocked, triggering biological steps that lead to most leukemias.
Inventing new drugs from scratch is expensive and time consuming—and even after that significant investment, over 50 percent of drug candidates fail in the final stages. Damon Runyon Board Member Todd R. Golub, MD, Former Damon Runyon Fellow Matthew L. Meyerson, MD, PhD, and colleagues, at the Broad Institute of MIT, Harvard and Dana-Farber Cancer Center, have developed a novel way to test FDA-approved non-oncology drugs for activity against cancer more efficiently, lowering the risk and cost involved in drug discovery.
Karuna Ganesh, MD, PhD (Clinical Investigator ’19-’22), and her colleagues at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, have discovered a novel framework for approaching metastasis and developing treatments. The researchers found that metastasis-initiating cells can hijack the body’s natural wound-healing abilities to colonize distant organs.
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