Ruth Lupu, PHD; North Shore University Health System Research Institute; Concept Award:

I have two Concept Awards and I am a collaborator on other Concept Awards. This particular Concept Award was determining whether our identified pro-angiogenic factor CYR61 binding to ?v?3 could be a target to restore Taxol resistance. And, we identified CYR61 several years ago in triple-negative breast cancer carcinomas, both in cells and in tumors. And, when we transfected that into MCF-7 cells which are generally breast tumor cells, they are not aggressive. CYR turned them into a very aggressive phenotype. And, concomitantly with that we show that the level of the integrin ?v?3 was turned on and then we demonstrated that the ability of Taxol which is one of the common drugs used currently for the treatment of breast cancers. We demonstrated that the cells that express CYR61 were all resistance to Taxol, and furthermore, we demonstrated that the use of agents such as peptidomemetic agent that was against the ?v?3 integrin was able to restore the sensitivity to Taxol. So, the whole premise of our work, was indeed, to restore the sensitivity to Taxol.

The Concept Award mechanism provided us really the opportunity to set up an idea such as the one I just described to you. What might have been a crazy idea or a very unique idea that nobody would have funded because we didn't know if it would have been succeeded. For many Concept Awards you can have one Concept Award that will work, and actually, I do believe that the Concept Awards are providing us the foundation for a much larger grant.

The Department of Defense Breast Cancer Program has attracted many investigators that were not in the Breast Cancer Program to come into this field, and that I believe has enriched the program tremendously. We have now collaborators from different environments; from computational science, engineer science, and many other sciences that we never had before.

We do a lot of collaborations that result out of this particular meeting. In fact, during this year's meeting, we have a collaboration that just began out of yesterday's lunch. And, it came out of the symposium that we attended, and in previous years we had the same impact. And, I think this is the goal of this particular Era of Hope Meeting which we don't see in other meetings in that they are not aimed at bringing people together.