ACS Awards Ganem Research Scholar Grant

Neil J. Ganem, PhD, assistant professor of pharmacology and medicine, section of hematology and medical oncology, has received a four-year, $792,000 Research Scholar Grant from the American Cancer Society.

Ganem’s research seeks to define the tumor suppression mechanisms that limit the proliferation of aneuploid cells (those cells possessing an abnormal number of chromosomes), as well as to identify the common genetic adaptations made by cancer cells to overcome these growth barriers.

According to Ganem, many aneuploid cancer cells continue to shuffle their chromosome content, often gaining and losing chromosomes with each cell division. “This trait of cancer cells is termed chromosome instability (CIN). CIN is known to facilitate tumor initiation, progression and relapse. Consequently, patients with CIN tumors have a poor clinical prognosis,” he explains.

Over the past decade, significant effort has been focused on identifying the underlying mechanisms that generate aneuploidy in cancer cells. However, there remains a lack of data describing how cells “sense” that they have an abnormal number of chromosomes and should stop proliferating.

“The aims of the ACS grant proposal are designed to identify how the tumor suppressor pathway, called the Hippo pathway, senses abnormal chromosome numbers, as well as to determine how cancer cells adapt to evade this surveillance mechanism. Moving forward, we would like to leverage these discoveries and develop new strategies to reactivate the Hippo pathway in human cancer cells,” he adds.

Ganem believes this work has the potential to reveal new therapeutic avenues that selectively kill abnormal, chromosomally unstable cancer cells while sparing the normal cells from which they originated.