Albert R. Cunningham, PHD - Louisiana State University Idea Award:

I started as a pre-doctoral student at the University of Pittsburgh and I won a pre-doctoral fellowship that I spent about two years working on looking at environmental factors and environmental chemicals that might cause breast cancer. From there, I went onto an Idea Award that also was looking at environmental chemicals that might cause breast cancer and trying to understand exactly why certain environmental chemicals might cause breast cancer. And, my most recent award is now looking at chemicals that have different toxicities in different breast cancer cell lines and trying to understand why certain chemicals are toxic to only certain types of breast cancer cells. And, if we can try to tease that apart we might be able to understand some targets that could be specific for drugs to interact with. The National Cancer Institute has the developmental therapeutics program where they test chemicals in approximately 60 cell lines for different toxic effects. There's a panel of breast cancer specific cells lines that they test chemicals in. Now, some chemicals are toxic across the board and other chemicals are only active against specific breast cancer cell lines. So, the idea is that there is something interesting or unique about a breast cancer cell line that might be a novel target for a drug to interact with. So, we are doing structured-activity relationship analysis on those to see if we can actually find an interesting target as a new therapeutic approach.

I started out with basically pure computational work and this work has now lead me into the field of proteomics and genomics. Since I started at the University of Pittsburgh I still maintain a collaborative interest up there with Billy Day and the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences. So, yes, we're stepping out from completely computational work into in vivo work or in vitro work to actually try to find the targets that were identified in the computational studies.

We would eventually like to have a maybe an entire suite of programs where we are actually doing the computational analyses of chemicals that cause breast cancer as well as chemicals that are cured of agents for breast cancer. And, coupling that tightly with basically in vitro work and in vivo work where we are actually going from computer models built on data that's been generated over the last 30 to 40 years and trying to come up with something that might be a new curative agent for breast cancer.

The Era of Hope meetings are very interesting since it brings breast cancer researchers from, I believe, across the country together. So, everything that we are looking at has a specific angle to breast cancer and you actually learn a lot about different topics or different concepts in breast cancer than, I believe, you would at a regular meeting where it might be just focused on cancer or toxicology. So, you get to see a whole lot of different aspects of breast cancer at the Era of Hope meetings.