HHMI Names 15 New Patient-Oriented Researchers

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) has selected 15 physician-scientists for appointments as HHMI investigators, in a periodic competition that emphasizes the application of research discoveries to medical treatments for patients. The new investigators lead patient-oriented programs at 13 institutions in the U.S.

In a departure from previous competitions, HHMI invited researchers with faculty appointments to applied directly for the positions, rather than having to be nominated by their respective institutions.

“This was the first time that HHMI solicited applications directly from individual faculty at leading institutions and the outcome is an unqualified success,” said David A. Clayton, vice president for research operations at HHMI, in a press release.

Among the winners – selected from 242 qualified applicants – are:

Vivian Cheung, associate professor of pediatrics and genetics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Cheung believes genetics should be a “foundation of predictive and preventive medicine,” and not just a “medical subspecialty.” She is particularly interested in ataxia telangiectasia, a genetic disease that appears in young children. Because patients can respond very differently to treatment, Cheung wants to create a tool based genetic data from her own studies, which would give doctors the information they need to design preventive care and help them make better treatment decisions.

Arul Chinnaiyan, professor of pathology and urology at the University of Michigan Medical School. In 2005, Chinnaiyan made a stunning discovery that questions the long-held belief that the causes of “liquid” cancers like leukemia, are fundamentally different from those that cause solid tumor cancers. Using DNA microarray technology and powerful computational analysis, he analyzed prostate cancer biopsies and found that almost 80 percent contained the same translocation-caused gene fusion as is present in cancers of the blood. Because that discovery did not fit current thinking, “We didn't believe our result at first, and we had to carry out further studies before we convinced ourselves it was true,” Chinnaiyan observes. This inspired Chinnaiyan's current ambitious plans to use high-throughput search methods to find fusion genes he believes may be the key to many solid tumors.

Daniel Haber, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and director of the Cancer Center at Massachusetts General Hospital. After reading a news story of one patient’s remarkable response to the cancer drug Iressa, Haber and his colleagues obtained cells from patients whose lung cancers had responded well to Iressa, and from patients who did not respond. By sequencing a gene responsible for the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) protein, they discovered that eight of the nine patients who responded to Iressa had mutations in that gene. But the seven patients who did not respond to Iressa did not have that mutation. Haber’s work demonstrated that a particular mutation fuels some cancers, and if the mutation can be blocked, the cancer dies.

Charles Sawyers, director of the Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Sawyers contributed to the design of a new cancer drug called Sprycel (dasatinib), which overcomes resistance to Gleevec in some patients. His approach combines genetic studies of patients' DNA with structural biology data. Sawyers collaborates with structural biologists whose studies are crucial for seeing how drugs “fit” with a potential target. The genetic studies involve sequencing each patient's resistance-enhancing mutation to understand how a drug responds to each mutation as it develops. “There are so many ideas that you can really move them into the clinic now,” he says. “If you do this with the scientific tools of genetics and genomics in your back pocket, you can pick the patient population intelligently and make progress much faster. That's the idea.”