October 22, 2009
拉霍亚，加利福尼亚州—Dr. Clodagh O’Shea, an assistant professor in the Molecular Cell and Biology Laboratory, has been selected by The Sontag Foundation to receive the 2009 Distinguished Scientist Award. She will receive $600,000 over a four-year period to develop new viral therapies to treat invariably fatal glioblastomas and other brain tumors.
Through the prestigious Distinguished Scientist Awards, The Sontag Foundation recognizes and supports the work of outstanding early career scientists whose research has the potential to generate new knowledge relating to causes, cures or treatment of brain tumors.
“The Sontag Foundation wants to get people with fresh ideas to think about brain cancer in novel ways,” says O’Shea. “I have not focused on brain cancer until I came to the Salk and breaking into the field would have been very difficult without their support. I am extremely excited to be able to translate the genetic understanding of brain cancer into transformative treatments for patients suffering from this terrible disease. To achieve this we will combine new viral vectors, tools and mouse models in a way that’s never been done before. It’s high risk but it really could change things.”
O’Shea is an expert on so-called oncolytic viruses that act as tumor-mutation guided missiles, which target tumor cells for their own purposes. When infected cells burst open to release thousands of viral progeny, the next generation of viruses can seek out remaining tumor cells and distant micro-metastases.
In virtually all glioblastomas the tumor suppressors Rb and p53 are inactivated, allowing her to engineer viruses that home in on brain tumor cells carrying Rb or p53-mutations. Initially, she will create mouse doppelgangers of the human therapeutic viruses to test their tumor selectivity and potency in a new mouse model of glioblastoma, developed in Inder Verma’s lab at the Salk, that faithfully replicates the human disease. If these viruses prove their mettle against mouse tumors, she will then apply the knowledge from these pre-clinical studies to develop new therapies for human brain cancers and other tumors.
“We have cured cancer in mice many times over,” says O’Shea. “It’s really important not to lose sight of the ultimate goal: to find effective treatments for human patients.”
Many patients’ brain tumors are inoperable and it is difficult to deliver drugs across the torturous brain tumor blood vessels, which proliferate abnormally to feed the tumor and distant metastases. Therefore, O’Shea will also exploit viruses that naturally infect blood vessels in the brain to identify and develop new therapeutic agents that specifically destroy the tumor blood vessels, starving the tumor to death.
About Clodagh O’Shea:
Born and raised in Cork, Ireland, O’Shea earned her bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry and Microbiology from the University College Cork, and her doctorate in Immunology from the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (ICRF)/Imperial College London, England. After completing a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of California in San Francisco, she was recruited to the Salk Institute in La Jolla in 2007.
About the Sontag Foundation:
The Sontag Foundation, headquartered in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, is a private foundation which funds medical research in the fields of brain cancer and rheumatoid arthritis on a national level and also awards grants to fund programs meeting various social and educational needs of individuals living in Northeast Florida. Since 2003, The Sontag Foundation has awarded over $12.8 million for brain cancer research. For additional information, go to www.sontagfoundation.org.
关于索尔克生物研究所：
索尔克生物学研究所是世界顶尖的基础研究机构之一，其国际知名的教职员工在一个独特的、协作和富有创造性的环境中，致力于探索生命科学的基本问题。索尔克科学家们既专注于科学发现，也致力于培养下一代研究人员，通过研究神经科学、遗传学、细胞生物学和植物生物学及相关学科，为我们理解癌症、衰老、阿尔茨海默病、糖尿病和心血管疾病做出了开创性贡献。.
学院取得了许多成就，获得了包括诺贝尔奖和美国国家科学院院士在内的无数荣誉。该研究所由脊髓灰质炎疫苗先驱 Jonas Salk 博士于 1960 年创立，是一家独立的非营利组织和建筑地标。.
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