Poised for takeoff

Pilot projects at Winship, already sho w ing great rewards, get a lif t

Wall Street investors would envy Sumin Kang, PhD.

The young researcher has taken $30,000 and parlayed it into $820,000 – within a year. But more important to Kang, head and neck cancer patients may one day benefit from what may look like financial wizardry but is really more about a passion for a protein called RSK2. Kang’s painstaking research into how RSK2 programs head and neck cancer cell invasion and results in metastasis has resulted in grant awards totaling more than threequarters of a million dollars. And it all stemmed from a $30,000 Robbins Scholar pilot grant awarded to her in 2010 by Winship.

The real benefit of Kang’s ground-breaking work is not so much about financial reward as it is advancing knowledge about how to best treat patients with head and neck cancer. That said, her grant support shows the success of recent pilot projects of brilliant, young Winship researchers with extraordinary vision and passion. Not only have pilot projects become more and more a Winship priority, but they are beginning to pay off exponentially – not only in additional grant awards but also in findings that show great promise in improving patient outcomes.

Kang, who became an assistant professor at Winship two years ago, received her Robbins pilot grant from Winship Cancer Institute only last year.

Her research not only resulted in nine publications and presentations but also resulted in a $720,000 grant from the American Cancer Society (ACS) and a $100,000 award from the Georgia Cancer Coalition. While she and her lab team gathered critical preliminary data the first year, she isn’t close to finished.

“We want to further study how this protein works,” Kang explains. “It’s about finding all the downstream targets and signaling.” The goal of understanding that, of course, is about therapeutic strategies to keep head and neck cancers from metastasizing.

The four-year ACS grant will allow Kang to move in that direction, allowing her to fully establish her research program, taking her from a senior post-doctoral fellow to an independent investigator studying pathways of a protein that plays a key role in a major cancer killer.

Kang’s success is emblematic of Winship’s intensifying emphasis on ever more aggressive, novel research that begins with pilot projects. These projects, often under the direction of senior-level faculty mentors, allow younger faculty an opportunity to blossom and to conduct research that shows great promise to improve patient outcomes.

“These pilot projects are really at the heart of what we do every day,” says Walter J. Curran Jr., executive director of Winship Cancer Institute. “These grants allow us to push forward aggressively in several different directions.”

The Robbins Scholars program, funded through the generosity of Sarah and Jim Kennedy and named in memory of their friend Jim Robbins, has launched many Winship pilot projects.

Winship recently received a boost for its ability to fund pilot projects thanks also to the generosity of the Wilbur and Hilda Glenn Family Foundation. The Glenn Family Foundation’s extraordinary gift of $5 million is specifically earmarked for breast cancer research, and a portion of the gift will allow Winship to fund several breast cancer pilot projects over the next few years.

“The generosity of the Glenns will allow us to galvanize the breast cancer program here in a way we haven’t been able to do before,” says Curran, noting that the breast cancer program will be named the Glenn Family Breast Program. “This is a tremendous boost that will accelerate discovery in Winship’s breast cancer research programs.”

Already, breast cancer patients stand to benefit from a pilot project underway by Mylin Torres, MD, assistant professor in the department of radiation oncology.

She was named a Robbins Scholar last year. In July, she learned that she has been awarded an NIH grant for $370,838 for two years. Torres is studying why women treated for breast cancer often develop persistent, debilitating fatigue.

This is especially important, Torres says, as the number of breast cancer survivors is growing, with about three million breast cancer survivors in the U.S.

“Right now, there’s no treatment for this type of fatigue, and no one knows when and if it will end,” she says.

So, working with her faculty mentor, Torres began to explore if radiation to the breast can cause a generalized inflammatory response that in turn causes fatigue and depression.

An especially novel aspect of her study is that study participants will have an ultrasound measurement of the breast skin to objectively quantify the thickness of the tissue – a measure of inflammation –before, during and after radiation.

“I don’t think there’s anywhere else in the country that has this capability,”

Torres says, crediting Tian Liu, PhD associate professor in radiation oncology and a specialist in ultrasound who is assisting in the study. “The ultrasound really allows you to objectively quantify what’s going on, instead of saying ‘this breast looks red. I’m going to grade this side effect as a grade 1 toxicity.’”

As with the work of all Winship researchers awarded pilot grants, the goal is to improve patient outcomes.

“What if a medication could be administered that doesn’t interfere with a cure but minimizes the side effects?” Torres wonders. “You hear of this debilitating fatigue, where women feel like they can’t wake up in the morning, and depression.”

Torres says she could never have received the NIH grant without the Robbins Scholar pilot grant, thus underscoring the importance of receiving that first grant to gain the larger national award.

“It’s very difficult to receive an NIH grant without the laboratory work behind it,” Torres says. “You want to have the scientific rationale to show them, and reviewers want biological reasons why things succeed or not. They want to know the molecular effect behind what you see.”

An added benefit is that she has been mentored, she says, by “one of the world’s experts on symptoms from cancer treatment.” That would be Andrew Miller, MD, professor of psychiatry and hematology and medical oncology, and coleader of Winship’s Cancer Prevention and Control Program.

Kang also credits her mentor, Jing Chen, PhD, assistant professor in the department of hematology and oncology, himself a pioneer in the study of cancer metabolism and an internationally renowned expert in cancer metabolism. Chen also serves as the leader of the basic research component of the Winship leukemia program.

‘This kind of pilot grant helped me very much,” Kang says. “It says, ‘I can do it.’”

Leukemia survivor bikes 1,700 miles to raise money for Winship; doctor and nurses share the journey.