PARTNERING FOR CURES
Collaborating with pharmaceutical and clinical partners helps Sanford-Burnham scientists translate their research into patient benefit—ensuring that promising early-stage discoveries don’t languish, but instead move into new treatments and innovations.
Clinical Collaborations Tackle Cancer from Every Angle Sanford-Burnham has partnered with several clinical medical centers, including Scripps Health, Cedars-Sinai, Sanford Health, Florida Hospital, and Moffitt Cancer Center. These joint translational medicine efforts combine the discovery research and laboratory science at Sanford-Burnham with clinical science and networks of physicians and patients at these partner hospitals. These collaborations—and hopefully more like them in the near future—will catalyze the discovery and development of innovative new therapies and diagnostics for cancer.
Standing up to Melanoma One in 51 people born today will be diagnosed with melanoma at some point in their lifetimes. To tackle this powerful threat, bi-coastal teams of Sanford-Burnham researchers are studying the root causes of melanoma and exploring personalized medicine—the idea that a person’s unique genetic makeup can impact his or her response to medical treatments. For example, Dr. Ze’ev Ronai studies cellular stress in the context of melanoma, work that has led to the discovery of several new targets for treating the disease (page 5). In addition, Dr. Ranjan Perera and his team are using advanced DNA sequencing technologies to study the genomes and epigenomes—chemical modifications that can alter the genome’s structure—of melanoma cells and normal skin cells. They hope this work will reveal molecular signatures that will allow them to divide melanoma into distinct subtypes. This re-classification might then allow physicians to personalize treatments to each specific subtype of melanoma, potentially improving outcomes for patients in the future.
As further evidence of Sanford-Burnham’s collaborative nature and dedication to melanoma research, Dr. Kristiina Vuori, Sanford-Burnham’s president and Cancer Center director, is part of a “Dream Team” working to find innovative new ways to fight melanoma. With funding from Stand Up To Cancer and the Melanoma Research Alliance, the multi-institute team is exploring a personalized medicine approach to treating metastatic melanoma—work that may also lay the groundwork for fighting many other tumor and disease types. Stand Up To Cancer is a program of the Entertainment Industry Foundation, a charitable organization that has raised more than $100 million for cancer research. The Dream Team—one of just six and the first to target melanoma—is led by researchers at the Translational Genomics Research Institute (Phoenix, Ariz.) and the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute (Detroit, Mich.) and brings together members from several other U.S. research institutions.
Visit our blog to read more about Sanford-Burnham’s translational research and clinical collaborations: beaker.sanfordburnham.org 11