2019-20 Dahod Awards Announced

Congratulations to the 2019-20 recipients of the Dahod Pilot Grant Program Fund, the Dahod Assistant Professorship and the Dahod International Scholar. In August 2008, Shamim Dahod (CGS’76, CAS’78, MED’87) and her husband Ashraf gave $10.5M to BUSM to establish the Shamim and Ashraf Dahod Breast Cancer Research Center, as well as these programs and endowments.

Dennis Jones, PhD, Assistant Professor of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine, has been awarded the Dahod Assistant Professorship. He will use breast cancer models to study the role of cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs) recruited to metastatic lymph nodes, the most common site of solid tumor metastases. Lymph node metastasis strongly correlate with cancer relapse. Dr. Jones and his team will evaluate subsets of lymph node CAFs to see if CAFs facilitate immune evasion of cancer cells in lymph nodes, thus promoting secondary tumor growth, survival and distant metastasis.
.
Sovannarith Korm, PhD, a postdoc in Dr. Hui Feng’s Laboratory of Zebrafish Genetics and Cancer Therapeutics, has been named the Dahod International Scholar. A Cambodian native, Dr. Korm is passionate about applying his research skills to improve treatment outcomes of women with breast cancer in his home country. His research focuses on understanding how triple-negative breast cancer cells use different nutrients and identifying effective means to target their metabolic dependencies.
.
Joshua D. Campbell, PhD, Assistant Professor, Division of Computational Biomedicine, Department of Medicine, has received a Dahod Pilot Grant for his work understanding basic interactions between tumor cells, the immune system and other cells within the microenvironment. Metabolic diseases also can alter cells within the immune system. Given the importance of the immune microenvironment in cancer development, progression and response to immunotherapy, comprehensive approaches are needed to characterize the cellular and molecular diversity present in the tumor tissue. Novel single-cell genomic technologies can measure a variety of different molecular features on individual cells. In collaboration with Gerald Denis, PhD, and other members from the departments of Medicine and Pathology, Dr. Campbell will apply these approaches to triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) from BMC patients with and without Type 2 Diabetes to understand the how metabolic disease alters the immune microenvironment and promotes tumor progression. Comprehensive immune profiling from breast cancer patients with and without T2D at single cell resolution should inform new clinical trials for cancer patients with co-morbid metabolic disease.
.
Bob Varelas, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Biochemistry and leader of the Varelas Lab has received a Dahod Pilot Grant. The goal of Dr. Varelas’ studies is to gain insight into the mechanisms that drive the onset of triple negative breast cancers that respond poorly to conventional therapies. His lab has developed new models to study this disease, which show that dysregulation of a signaling pathway, known as the Hippo pathway, results in induced gene expression changes that promote a series of pro-tumorigenic processes. This grant will allow the Lab to combine their models with biochemical approaches to better understand the mechanisms that contribute to triple negative breast cancer development. One focus is to gain knowledge into an altered epigenetic program (i.e. gene expression changes that do not involve alterations in the DNA sequence) that they have found is induced by aberrant Hippo pathway signaling, as these events may be susceptible to novel therapeutics. They hope that knowledge gained from their studies will provide new targeting strategies for this disease.
.
William Evan Johnson, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Medicine, has received a Dahod Pilot Grant for his work in triple negative breast cancer (TNBC). In the most comprehensive molecular evaluation of TNBC in African American (AA) patients to date, Dr. Johnson will apply innovative new molecular technologies to map the behaviors of individual cells in TBNC in these patients. Typically one of the more aggressive types of breast cancer, TBNC is disproportionately more common in AA women compared to European American (EA) women. The racial disparity associated with TNBC between EA and AA represents one of the most significant disparities in oncology, and is generally understudied compared to other breast subtypes. Until recently, the intra-tumoral and inter-tumoral heterogeneity of TBNC was not well understood, particularly in AA women. Dr. Johnson believes this research will make significant progress toward profiling cellular phenotypes associated with TNBC in AA women, and provide insight into strategies for precision therapeutics for this highly disparate cancer type.