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Image courtesy of the American Association for Cancer Research

The annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) kicks off this weekend, highlighting recent advances in understanding cancer, both in laboratory and in the clinic. In recognition of their role in driving progress in these areas, Ó³»­´«Ã½ researchers are among those being honored at this year's meeting.

Stuart Schreiber, director of the Ó³»­´«Ã½'s Chemical Biology Program, will receive the 2010 AACR Award for Outstanding Achievement in Chemistry and Cancer Research. The award, established in 2007, honors "outstanding, novel, and significant chemistry research, which has led to important contributions to the fields of basic cancer research, translational cancer research; cancer diagnosis; the prevention of cancer; or the treatment of patients with cancer."

The AACR award recognizes Schreiber’s work related to cancer, including his discoveries that drugs can result from targeting specific classes of proteins previously thought to be unlikely targets for drugs. Schreiber and his colleagues showed, in each case for the first time, that a drug or a soon-to-become drug can act on a protein kinase, protein phosphatase and protein deacetylase. These proteins represent three classes that are now among the most commonly pursued drug targets, especially cancer drug targets, in pharmaceutical research. Schreiber and his colleagues also showed that a drug-like compound can disrupt the process through which proteins are degraded in cells, a finding that accelerated the discovery of a cancer drug that targets a member of a fourth previously unlikely class of proteins that control the breakdown of proteins through specialized structures known as proteasomes.

Schreiber, who is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and the Morris Loeb Professor at Harvard University, will deliver an award lecture at the AACR meeting based on his work entitled, "Small-Molecule Probes of Cancer Biology."

Another Ó³»­´«Ã½ scientist, senior associate member Matthew Meyerson, is also among the researchers recognized this year by AACR. Meyerson and his colleagues at the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center will receive the 2010 AACR Team Science Award for collaborative work that has led to fundamental discoveries in cancer biology or has significantly advanced the methods for detection, diagnosis, prevention or treatment of cancer.

Several years ago, Meyerson, a professor of pathology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, helped lead an international team of researchers from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research (now part of the Ó³»­´«Ã½) and Nagoya City University Hospital in Japan.

Together, he and his colleagues discovered why some patients respond to a certain lung cancer drug, called gefitinib, and others do not. Their work, along with a related study led by Daniel Haber of the Massachusetts General Hospital, unearthed genetic misspellings in a particular gene, known as EGFR. The scientists found that lung cancer patients who carry these gene misspellings (or "mutations") in their tumors are more likely to be helped by the drug than those who do not.

Although this kind of personalized approach to cancer treatment is yet to be used widely in the clinic, a major goal of modern cancer research is to lay the scientific groundwork so that someday all patients will receive the treatments that work best for them.