M. D. Anderson Receives $4 Million Gift to Establish New Gene Therapy Center

To advance efforts in gene therapy research at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center - an early leader in establishing the feasibility of gene therapy to arrest cancer cell growth - the W. M. Keck Foundation of Los Angeles has given a $4 million grant to the institution.

The gift will establish the W. M. Keck Center for Cancer Gene Therapy, a multidisciplinary research program to stimulate scientific collaboration and creative solutions for furthering gene therapy as a treatment for certain cancers. Considered a new frontier in cancer treatment, gene therapy involves the injection of healthy cancer-stopping genes into cancer cells to eliminate the spread of the disease.

Established in 1954 by William Myron Keck, founder of The Superior Oil Company, the Keck Foundation is one of the nation's largest philanthropic organizations. The Los Angeles-based foundation has made grants of about $550 million, largely funding projects in science, engineering and medical research. Foundation grants favor projects that could lead to breakthrough discoveries and the development of new technologies.

"Thanks to this generous gift from the Keck Foundation, we are able to build upon a tradition of ground-breaking research at M. D. Anderson," says M. D. Anderson President Dr. John Mendelsohn. "We are especially proud to have the Keck Foundation - which has been responsible for funding much important work in the medical arena - support our mission to eradicate cancer with a gift of this magnitude."

A vector core laboratory is one of the most significant features of the newly funded center. Instead of having to individually produce vectors - a means of delivering a gene to a cell - in their own labora- tories, M. D. Anderson scientists in any discipline will be able to request the specialized laboratory to produce them in mass, saving time and expense.

The Keck funding also will support research teams studying innovative treatments for cancers of the lung, head and neck, bladder, prostate, liver, brain, breast and ovaries. Grant money will support not only basic and clinical research, but also translational research, the stage at which promising treatments are applied to human cancers.

"This grant will help give certain projects the opportunity to develop the necessary preliminary data to be competitive for additional federal funding," points out Dr. Jack Roth, who will direct the W. M. Keck Center for Cancer Gene Therapy. Dr. Roth is chairman of the department of thoracic and cardiovascular surgery at M. D. Anderson.

Dr. Roth's research at M. D. Anderson reported the first successful correction of a defective p53 tumor suppressor gene in human lung cancer, thereby confirming the feasibility of genetic therapy based on injecting normal p53 genes directly into tumors.

"In the Medical Research Program, the W.M. Keck Foundation has long had a focus on supporting basic biomedical research initiatives that advance groundbreaking work in the fields of neuroscience, immunology, molecular genetics and structural biology," says Roxanne Ford, program director at the foundation. "We are proud of the grant to the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, which will support the Human Cancer Gene Prevention and Therapy Program and allow researchers to study the applications of human genetics to the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of cancer."

Previous private funding like the Keck Foundation gift, Dr. Roth explains, has helped facilitate several gene therapy programs at M. D. Anderson that have already exhibited great promise, including:

• Injection of the p53 adenovirus into lung, head and neck, prostate, bladder and brain cancer cells. The healthy p53 tumor suppressor gene has shown promise in correcting mutant cancer-stopping genes and ultimately causing cancer cell death and shrinking tumor size;
  
  
• Insertion of the E1A gene - found in a common cold virus - into breast and ovarian cancer cells. Researchers are hopeful that this therapy will inhibit the overexpressed HER-2/neu gene from perpetuating tumor cells growth to save the lives of women with very aggressive forms of breast or ovarian cancers; and
  
  
• Application of chemoprotection, a process of shielding healthy stem cells from damaging chemotherapy during bone marrow transplants. Scientists have seen early success from using the HSV-TK suicide gene to selectively attack only tumor cells in the bone marrow from some breast cancer patients so the bone marrow can be used safely for transplantation.

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©2006 Texas Medical Center

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