The Stanford University School of Medicine recently received a $20 million gift to set up a new research enterprise to study cancer stem cells.

The money was part of a $120 million commitment made by the New York-based Virginia and D.K. Ludwig Fund for Stanford and five other academic centers nationwide.

The five other centers are Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Johns Hopkins University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology , Dana Farber Cancer Institute and the University of Chicago. The commitment is one of the largest gifts ever by a private foundation for cancer research.

At Stanford, the funding will be used to launch the Ludwig Center for Cancer Stem Cell Research and Medicine. The goal of the center is to identify and better understand the role of cancer stem cells in common cancers and then use this knowledge to develop more effective treatments.

Daniel K. Ludwig invented the supertanker and was one of the richest men in the world. He had a philosophy that “to accomplish anything, you pick the best and brightest and give them the money to do their job,” said Sarah White, Ludwig Fund spokeswoman.

Dr. Irving Weissman is considered the “best and brightest” in his field. In 2005, he accepted the Virginia and D. K. Ludwig Professorship for Clinical Investigation in Cancer Research at Stanford.

“Clearly Dr. Weissman is a star and his research expertise is stem cells,” says White.

The funding will build on Stanford’s wide-ranging expertise in cancer and stem cells. Weissman, who first identified blood-forming stem cells in humans and mice, will direct the new enterprise. Dr. Michael Clarke, professor of medicine at Stanford and the first scientist to identify cancer stem cells in breast cancer, will serve as its deputy director.

The first cancer stem cells were discovered a decade ago in acute myeloid leukemia and have since been found in solid tumors, including brain, breast and prostate tumors. These stem cells have the exclusive ability to generate new cancer cells and cause the disease to spread.
Research for cancer stem cells has “gotten more support starting five, six years ago,” says Roeland Nusse, PhD, professor of developmental biology and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. “Now there is enormous interest in this area.”

Dr. Nusse,a leading scientist in the area of signaling pathways, is working on mechanisms that “maintain the immortal status of tumor stem cells.” His lab is working on Wnt proteins, which regulate cell-to-cell interactions during embryogenesis, but also are implicated in cancer.

“A cancer is similar to normal tissue,” he says, except that it escapes growth control. His lab is working to define tumor stem cells in ovarian and colon cancer, and find ways to interfere with the growth of the cells. More important than seeing if the total tumor mass can be reduced, as in chemotherapy, is to see if tumor stem cells are being reduced, he says.

Stanford’s Assistant Professor of Surgery Dr. Andrew Shelton, works with Dr. Clarke, providing his lab with tissue for use in the study of colon cancer. The ultimate goal for his work with Clarke is to “hopefully parlay the research into treatments for patients with colorectal cancer.”

The Ludwig Center will include more than 30 faculty members in 10 departments. Faculty at the new center will collaborate with their counterparts at Stanford’s Comprehensive Cancer Center and Stanford’s Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine.

Researchers at Stanford also hope to interact through the Ludwig network with other groups that are complementary to their work. For instance, scientists at the Ludwig Center at Memorial Sloan-Kettering are focused on the immunology of cancer; Stanford researchers will collaborate with them in examining the immune responses to cancer stem cells.
Lisa Winer is a freelance reporter in San Francisco.

—By Lisa Winer

Posted on January 19, 2007 03:23 PM