Alejandro Sweet-Cordero, left, assistant professor of pediatrics at Stanford's School of Medicine, has been named one of six (the only Californian) research grantees by the National Cancer Coalition. Dr. Sweet-Cordero is a specialist in "optimal treatment of pediatric bone sarcomas."
The National Cancer Coalition (NCC), headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina, is a 501(C) (3) nonprofit charity whose partners include Pfizer and Merck, among other major pharmaceutical companies and medical centers. Its president and CEO, Robert Landry, was formerly an attorney in New Orleans who represented "some of the largest health-care companies in the United States."
Dr. Sweet-Cordero's laboratory at Stanford reports on the biology of pediatric bone sarcoma:
The two most frequent bone sarcomas in children are Osteosarcoma and Ewing's Sarcoma.
According to the National Institutes of Health, Ewing's sarcoma can occur any time during childhood and young adulthood, but usually develops during puberty, when bones are growing rapidly. It is 10 times as common in Caucasian children as in African-American, African, and Asian children. The tumor may arise anywhere in the body, usually in the long bones of the arms and legs, the pelvis, or the chest. It may also develop in the skull or the flat bones of the trunk. There are few symptoms. The most common is pain and occasionally swelling at the site of the tumor.Children may also break a bone at the site of the tumor after a seemingly minor injury (this is called a "pathologic fracture"). Fever may also be present.
Our laboratory is interested in understanding the cell of origin of these tumors. In addition, we are studying the role that tumor-initiating cells ("cancer stem cells") play in mediating aggressiveness and chemotherapy resistance in Ewing's sarcoma and Osteosarcoma. For these studies, we make use of established cell lines as well as primary tumor samples from patients.
Through a well-established collaboration with several sarcoma centers (UCSF and UW in addition to Stanford), we have collected a large bank of primary xenograft samples from both pre and post-chemotherapy patient biopsies to address these questions.
Chromosomal translocations are frequent genetic events in the genesis of many human cancers. They are particularly frequent in tumors common in pediatric patients. In Ewing's sarcoma, the most common translocation is EWS/FLI-1. We are using a variety of approaches in both mouse and human primary cells to study the mechanism of EWS/FLI-1 mediated oncogenesis.
As ets transcription factors such as Fli-1 and Erg are mutated in other tumors in addition to EWS (i.e, erg mutations in prostate cancer) our findings in these model systems may have broader applicability to other tumor types.
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