Superior student cancer research proposals awarded

Expectations don’t come much higher than they do when it comes to curing cancer. Philanthropist John G. Rangos Sr. fuels that audacious hope with the bold claim that Hopkins will surely be the first to cure cancer. On the strength of his conviction, Mr Rangos thus created the Rangos Award for Creativity in Cancer Discovery, which was presented to finalists Jason Howard, Ashwin Ram, Hogan Tang, Sylvie Stacy and Xiaochuan Yang on April 3.

Open to enrolled, full-time students at any Hopkins division, the Rangos Award is meant to inspire original ideas and innovative approaches to metastatic cancer research and treatment through cash awards totaling nearly $50,000.

The need for metastatic cancer research is critical. A metastatic cancer has spread from its original to another place in the body, and usually cannot be cured with current treatments. The most medicine can currently do is to control the growth or relieve the symptoms. In a few cases, these treatments may prolong life, but most people who die of cancer die of metastatic disease.

First-place winner, JHU research-fellow Dr. Jason D. Howard, took home $25,000 for his project proposal. His plan was a modified version of a process known as express protein migration, or “protein stapling,” aimed at developing anti-cancer vaccines similar to the human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccine. Howard intends to study whether it is possible to mobilize the body’s immune system to attack cancerous cells it would not otherwise perceive as dangerous by stapling a protein the body does recognized as “foreign” to the cancer cells.

“Normally vaccines are just a dead virus, and you really can’t do biochemistry with just a piece of dead virus,” Howard said. “But you can do biochemistry with a piece of protein.”

The HPV vaccine is so interesting to Howard because of its simplicity. It’s a little ball of protein the body has been trained to attack.

“Maybe the immune system recognizes the mixture [of virus protein and the self-protein of the cancer cells] better than it would without the viral proteins,” Howard said. “So I said, ‘why don’t I just take proteins out from any tumor and stick the viral proteins on there?’”

Research involving the HPV vaccine and mice with and without immune systems supports this proposed line of investigation.

Most winners were from the medical sciences, but not all.

Fourth place winner Sylvie Stacy, M.D., is studying her Masters in Public Health at Hopkins, and proposed an innovative approach to help get new scientific discoveries in cancer to their actual equivalent use in a clinical setting.

“I approached the problem from more of a public health point of view,” Stacy said. “Since basic science in cancer is emerging at a quick pace and changing at such a quick pace to very individualized cancer care approaches, if we continue to use the same testing and approval system we are going to fall behind in cancer discoveries.

“Our traditional phases of human testing do not lend themselves to individualized drugs or other treatments for cancer. We need to use more unique clinical trial design and allow pre-clinical studies to sort of seamlessly turn i

nto post-approval studies so that we can not miss about on important data that may be beneficial in determining how well a product works.”

Despite the critical need for metastatic research, some question the utility of the Rangos award. There are no stipulations in the award regarding the use of the prize money. Even if there were requirements that the money be spent on these research proposals, it is unlikely that they would contribute to significant advancements in the field.

“The thing about research is that it is way more expensive than $25,000,” Howard said. “But if someone’s willing to fund [my idea] I’m more than willing to look at it.” After his presentation on his proposal, Howard approached deans of the Hopkins medical school and asked if they thought his idea could work. The response was enthusiastically positive.

Howard painted a worrisome picture of the current trends in academic research funding that stifle some forms of creativity.

“The way that funding is going now, [my project] would never get funded in a million years,” Howard said. “These are high-risk, high-reward proposals and [funders] want to spend money on stuff that is going to work...you end up proposing things that everyone already thinks is going to work or that you’ve already done. And that might advance science about 10-15%, but that’s maybe not enough to do anything with.”

“But, on the flip-side,” Dr. Howard reflects, “when you are so hyper-focused on what you do, you don’t ever sit back and look at the forest. You’re looking at one leaf on one branch of the tree. It’s going to take a little jostling to get researchers to commit to this kind of time to think this way.”

Mr. Rangos is a technological pioneer himself, having advanced the field of waste transportation and disposal. His own innovations run the gamut from converting power plant boiler ash into cinder blocks to developing methods of recycling bituminous byproducts and disposing of sewage and sludge. Given Mr. Rangos’ own propensity for creativity, it ultimately seems fitting that innovations in trash removal may spur creative innovations in cancer research.