Damon Runyon News

Omar Abdel-Wahab, MD (Damon Runyon Clinical Investigator ‘13-‘16), from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and Adrian R. Krainer, PhD, from Cold Spring Harbor, collaborated to uncover how a genetic mutation can cause RNA messages to be blocked, triggering biological steps that lead to most leukemias.

Inventing new drugs from scratch is expensive and time consuming—and even after that significant investment, over 50 percent of drug candidates fail in the final stages. Damon Runyon Board Member Todd R. Golub, MD, Former Damon Runyon Fellow Matthew L. Meyerson, MD, PhD, and colleagues, at the Broad Institute of MIT, Harvard and Dana-Farber Cancer Center, have developed a novel way to test FDA-approved non-oncology drugs for activity against cancer more efficiently, lowering the risk and cost involved in drug discovery.

​Karuna Ganesh, MD, PhD (Clinical Investigator ’19-’22), and her colleagues at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, have discovered a novel framework for approaching metastasis and developing treatments. The researchers found that metastasis-initiating cells can hijack the body’s natural wound-healing abilities to colonize distant organs.

The Mark Foundation for Cancer Research has awarded six grants to promising early career scientists for projects aimed at addressing unmet needs in cancer research. Eliezer Van Allen, MD (Damon Runyon Clinical Investigator ’15-’20), of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, received the competitive award for his research to improve clinical care for prostate cancer patients.

Scientists have found a clue as to how melanoma cells are able to metastasize. Ralph J. DeBerardinis, MD, PhD (Damon Runyon Clinical Investigator ’11-’14) and colleagues at Children's Medical Center Research Institute at UT Southwestern (CRI) discovered that some melanoma cells carry proteins on their surface that help them survive the hostile environment of the bloodstream as they travel to distant organs and form new tumors.

This year, five Damon Runyon alumni were chosen as American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellows in honor of their invaluable contributions to science and technology. 

Scientists first noticed circles of DNA floating alongside the regular chromosomes inside some cells, but they didn’t know the purpose of this “extrachromosomal DNA.” Now, Former Damon Runyon Scholar Howard Chang, PhD, of Stanford University, and colleagues have found that these doughnut-shaped pieces of DNA increase the malignancy of cancer cells.

Three Damon Runyon alumni were elected to the National Academy of Medicine. Election to the Academy is considered one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine and recognizes individuals who have demonstrated outstanding professional achievement and commitment to service: Edwin (Ted) G. Abel, PhD (Former Fellow ’93-’96); Julie A. Segre, PhD (Former Fellow ’97-’00); and Catherine J. Wu, MD (Former Clinical Investigator ’07-’12).

Peter J. Turnbaugh, PhD (Damon Runyon Innovator '16-'20), at the University of California, San Francisco, discusses his recent discovery that eating a diet of cooked food fundementally changes the microbes living in the gut compared to a diet of raw foods.

Surprising new research from Jason M. Sheltzer, PhD (Damon Runyon-Rachleff Innovator ’18 - ’20) and colleagues at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory suggests why 97% of cancer drugs in clinical trials fail to stop cancer in patients and never make it to market.