Tackling Cancer with Help from a Tropical Fish (and The New York Community Trust)

Tackling Cancer with Help from a Tropical Fish (and The New York Community Trust)
This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.
Zebrafish are being used to find new treatments for hard-to-cure cancers.

Zebrafish are being used to find new treatments for hard-to-cure cancers.

Shutterstock

By Leigh Ross, Program Associate, Promising Futures at The New York Community Trust

What do tropical freshwater fish, cancer research, and wills prepared half a century ago have in common?

At first glance, very little. But the answer can be found in medical research supported by The New York Community Trust, New York City’s nine-decade-old community foundation. In this case, researchers from Mt. Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine are using zebrafish to study cancers that are resistant to standard radiation therapy.

This project is just one example of the pioneering medical research supported by The Trust’s partnership with the Pershing Square Foundation, which awards annual, three-year grants of $600,000 to promising, early-career scientists. The grants are intended to help the scientists take risks and make bold choices during an early, formative time in their professional development. Fewer than eight percent of first-time applicants get funding from the National Institutes of Health, a major funder of biomedical research; those that don’t get funded can miss the chance to try out their new and often unorthodox ideas.

Although this research relies on the latest technology, the funding dates back to the mid-20th century. It is the enduring legacy of two donors to The Trust, Charles Spaeth and Helen H. O’Connor, who created permanent funds because they wanted to keep helping New Yorkers in perpetuity.

Mr. Spaeth prepared his will in 1959; Ms. O’Connor, in 1962. They didn’t know one another, and neither had any idea that their bequests would eventually be used to help people afflicted with radiation-resistant cancer. But they did know that they wanted to advance understanding of disease prevention and treatment.

“This is what is so special about our work at The Trust,” says Irfan Hasan, a program director at The Trust who oversees its grants for health and behavioral health. “We have the privilege of honoring a donor’s wishes over the long term, and often that involves methods that couldn’t be envisioned at the time the gift was made.”

In this case, the expertise of The Trust’s program staff is complemented by the Pershing Square Foundation’s painstaking selection process. Over a period of seven months, applicants submit letters describing their projects, followed by full proposals, and finally a select few are invited to present their ideas to a jury. This year, five researchers were funded by Pershing Square, and a sixth, Dr. Samuel Sidi of Mt. Sinai, received a grant from The Trust.

This work could have big implications for people who are sick. The type of head and neck cancer being studied by Dr. Sidi, for instance, is extremely common—it is the fifth most common cancer worldwide—and very deadly. So deadly that survival rates haven’t improved in more than 35 years. Now, because of The Trust and its donors, that could change.

Dr. Sidi and his colleagues have found that fish embryos who lack a certain gene, the p53 gene, are profoundly resistant to radiation—just as in some human tumors. Now, they have found a drug that restores sensitivity to radiation in the mutant fish and are determining if it might also work with human cancer cells.

“Funding from The Trust will help us reach our goal when many other institutions have deemed the project way too risky,” said Dr. Sidi. “It is fantastic that The Trust recognizes the part of risk in innovation, but chooses to support innovation nonetheless.”

Popular in the Community

Close

What's Hot