Major Trends in Modern Cancer Research

Faculty Member Harold Varmus

"We repeated this event because there was such enthusiasm and there were such fantastic questions asked [last year], especially by high school students from the audience," said Memorial Sloan-Kettering President Harold Varmus, welcoming guests to the symposium.

"My students and I loved Major Trends in Modern Cancer Research both this year and last year," enthused Tobie Brandriss, biology teacher and science curriculum coordinator for the SAR High School in Riverdale, New York. Ms. Brandriss returned for the second year accompanied by 15 of her students and four SAR faculty members. "The program provides high school students and their teachers with an enviable opportunity to hear from scientists working in the foremost cancer institute in the world. For young people to see how concepts they've learned about in science class are actually applied in the labs at Memorial Sloan-Kettering has a tremendous, positive impact. I'm delighted that Dr. Varmus recognizes the value of stimulating students' interest in science."

Faculty Member James Allison

The evening's three speakers explained, each from the perspective of his or her own discipline, how basic research into the regulation and control of normal cells in the body contributes to a fuller understanding of the behavior of cancer cells, and how this may lead to improvements in the treatment of patients with cancer.

"The cell is a very busy place," said Alan Hall, Chair of the Cell Biology Program within the Sloan-Kettering Institute, describing the behavior of normal cells. "Cell biologists are interested in understanding how that works -- how energy is made, how the cell divides -- how all this stuff is going on inside the cell." His talk was punctuated by several movies filmed using microscopy that showed cells "in action," including programmed cell death, cell division, and cell movement.

Faculty Member Johanna Joyce

Johanna A. Joyce, who heads a laboratory in Sloan-Kettering Institute's Cancer Biology and Genetics Program, spoke about how cancer cells are influenced by the environment in which they grow and by the other cells that surround them. These other cells are called the tumor microenvironment, and much of Dr. Joyce's talk focused on potential strategies for developing drugs to target that microenvironment as a way to kill cancer cells. "The take-home message is that [we want to] target cells within the tumor microenvironment, in combination with agents that target tumor cells," she said. "The idea then is that we can have effective [cancer treatments] and stable disease."

The body's immune system, and the extent to which it is able to recognize cancer cells as abnormal and mobilize to control or eliminate them, was the subject of the talk by James P. Allison, Chair of Sloan-Kettering Institute's Immunology Program. Dr. Allison described a variety of strategies for harnessing the immune system to target cancer cells, including an antibody that blocks CTLA-4, a protein that inhibits immune responses to cancer. "One of the things . . . that attracted us to this sort of scheme for trying to treat cancer," he said, "[is that] since we're manipulating the immune system and not trying to target individual tumor cells, this approach should be effective against any kind of cancer."

After each presentation and at the conclusion of all the talks, students were invited to ask the researchers questions about their work, and many did.

Last year's seminar produced a further educational opportunity for one of Ms. Brandriss' students. Daniel Chamudot, a tenth grader, pursued research on computer imaging this past summer with Yousef Mazaheri, a physicist on at Memorial Sloan-Kettering's Imaging and Spectroscopic Physics Service in the Department of Medical Physics. "Attending last year's seminar made the research scientists real and approachable for Daniel and enabled him to imagine that he, too, might do research some day," observed Ms. Brandriss.