A promising approach to discovering new cancer treatments is at the heart of MCV Campus research to interfere with the cell signals that instigate cancerous growth. By Paul Brockwell Jr.
26
S U M M E R 2 0 21
Saïd Sebti can trace his interest in combatting some of the most vicious cancers to a sleepless summer night in his teens. He vividly remembers visiting a friend in Rabat, Morocco, and being kept awake most of the night by the agonizing sounds and screams of pain he could hear from his friend’s next-door neighbor, a woman he would learn the next morning was suffering from cancer. As a teen, he wondered why this woman could not simply go to a doctor to receive medication and relief from her torment. That moment stuck with a 14-year-old Sebti and has been a strong undercurrent in his drive to discover potential solutions to cancer. He earned his doctorate in the U.S. and has steadily worked to shine new light on what causes various cancers and to develop treatments that might work against those causes. Today, Saïd Sebti, Ph.D., is the associate director for basic research at VCU Massey Cancer Center, the Lacy Family Chair in Cancer Research, and a professor of pharmacology and toxicology in the VCU School of Medicine. His lab focuses on understanding the mechanisms by which normal body cells turn cancerous. Cancer develops when mutations occur in some of our genes, which cause aberrant signals that trigger uncontrolled cellular division, growth and metastasis, all hallmarks of cancer. Dr. Sebti hopes to better understand the aberrant signals that cause cancer and, armed with that knowledge, his team seeks to find novel anti-cancer drugs to disrupt the signals that cause some cells to run amok and wreak havoc on the body. Dr. Sebti came to the MCV Campus from the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute in Tampa, Florida, where he led programs in drug discovery, chemical biology and molecular oncology research. Dr. Sebti’s research has received more than $60 million in funding from the National Cancer Institute (NCI), National Institutes of Health, American Cancer Society and others. In 2016, Dr. Sebti received a prestigious NCI R35 Outstanding Investigator Award, which provides $6.4 million over seven years.
