Eilene Zimmerman

San Diego Business

Scripps Research Institute Gets A $10 Million Grant

Money will go to study cancer cell behavior
By Eilene Zimmerman
Posted on Fri, Oct 30th, 2009
Last updated Thu, Oct 29th, 2009

The National Cancer Institute just awarded a $10 million, five-year grant to fund a new physics oncology center being led by the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla. The money will be used to help scientists at the center better understand what happens to cancer cells when they spread throughout the body from a tumor, a process known as metastasis. It’s an enormous health concern, because there are about 1.5 million new cases of cancer diagnosed each year in the U.S., according to the American Cancer Society. Cancer is responsible for 23 percent of all deaths in this U.S., second only to heart disease.

Peter Kuhn

_{Courtesy photo}

The grant is part of a new initiative at the National Cancer Institute, says Peter Kuhn, a Scripps research professor and the principal investigator of the grant. That initiative will create a series of 12 Physical Sciences-Oncology Centers with the aim of advancing the understanding of the physical laws and principles that govern the emergence and behavior of cancer. This represents a new way of thinking of cancer, says National Cancer Institute director John E. Niederhuber, because physical scientists think in terms of “time, space, pressure, heat and evolution in ways that we hope will lead to new understandings of the multitude of forces that govern cancer.”

Kuhn says right now there is a large knowledge gap in our understanding of cancer progression: “This process is, in large part, a physical one. Cancer cells have to make it through many different environments and survive lots of enemies on the way.” Scientists will investigate the physics and mathematics of that process, helping them paint a comprehensive portrait of cancer cells—their numbers, physical properties and gene expression profiles.

Cancer has been an elusive subject to study over the years. Just recently, scientists have wondered if some cancer tumors should simply be left alone, because certain ones appear to stop growing, shrink and sometimes disappear all on their own. A paper published in mid-October in the Journal of the American Medical Association called into question the view that cancer has a linear progression—one that would include metastasizing.

The Scripps-led center has been named 4DB Center, a shortened version of the project’s full name: “Focusing on Four Dimensional Heterogeneity of Fluid Phase Biopsies in Cancer.” It joins Scripps’ scientists with those from UCSD’s Moores Cancer Center, Billings Clinic (in Billings Montana), engineers at the Viterbi School of Engineering at USC and biomedical engineers at Oregon Health & Sciences University.

The hope is that this new research will tell scientists something about how cancer cells act in space—primarily inside a patient’s body—and over time, and will help in the development of new therapies.

About the author: Eilene Zimmerman is a journalist based in San Diego who writes about a variety of topics, including business, social and political issues and family life. Her work has been published in national magazines and newspapers including The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Christian Science Monitor, FORTUNE Small Business, CNNMoney.com, CBS MoneyWatch.com, Wired, Harper’s, Salon.com, Slate.com, Psychology Today and others. She blogs at www.trueslant.com.
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