Drs. Michele Carbone and Haining Yang, professors at University of Hawaiʻi Cancer Center, are recipients of the prestigious V Foundation for Cancer Research All-Star Translational Award.
The $1 million grant — payable throughout a 5-year period — will support their research of unique characteristics of mesothelioma developing in patients carrying germline BAP1 mutations.
Dr. Michele Carbone (Courtesy Photo: University of Hawaiʻi)- Dr. Haining Yang (Courtesy Photo: University of Hawaiʻi)
Carbone and Yang discovered a new disease that they named “BAP1 Cancer Syndrome,” which they linked to inherited mutations of the BAP1 gene.
People born with these mutations develop several cancer types throughout their lifetimes, most commonly mesothelioma.
Carbone and Yang — with support from the V Foundation All-Star Translational Award — will study how BAP1-mutant patients manage to fight and survive cancer.
The research will provide more opportunities to target the same mechanisms in all cancer patients and make them more resistant to cancer-cell invasion of nearby tissues and organs.
The All-Star Translational Award is a re-investment in an exceptional and innovative previous V Scholar, Translational or Game-Changer cancer research grant recipient.
Carbone, Yang and Dr. Ian Pagano were previously awarded in 2012 for their proposal “HMGB1: A Biomarker for Mineral Fiber Exposure and Detection of Malignant Mesothelioma.”
V Foundation for Cancer Research was founded in 1993 by the late Jim Valvano, North Carolina State University basketball coach and ESPN commentator. It funded more than $458 million in cancer research grants throughout North America.
Nonprofit V Foundation’s mission is to “fund game-changing research and all-star scientists to accelerate Victory Over Cancer and save lives.”
The highly competitive award process follows a rigorous scientific review supervised by a world-class scientific advisory committee.
Because of previous discoveries by Carbone and Yang, the U.S. National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Md., opened a surgical clinical trial for cancer patients carrying BAP1 mutations.
Both studies demonstrate their work within National Cancer Institute clinical trials that follow BAP1 mutant families for more than 20 years. He and Yang have enrolled and studied these patients in collaboration with National Cancer Institute physicians.
By studying families affected by the BAP1 Cancer Syndrome, Carbone and Yang discovered that these patients can “fight mesothelioma because the cancer cells in these patients are, for the most part, unable to invade nearby tissues and organs, and therefore these patients survive many years,” Carbone said.
“When mesothelioma develops in asbestos workers, these cancers are deadly within 1 to 2 years because they are invasive and resistant to therapy,” says their research. “In other words, our researchers discovered that on one hand BAP1 mutations cause cancer; on the other hand, when cancer develops, those patients that carry a BAP1 mutation in their germline can actually fight cancer growth.”
Their data have been independently confirmed by a surgical clinical trial conducted in National Institutes of Health Clinical Center by National Cancer Institute intramural investigators and published back-to-back in the same issue of Journal of Thoracic Oncology, the official journal of the International Agency to Study Lung Cancer.
Visit the University of Hawai‘i Cancer Center website for additional information about the center and what it does.
Visit the V Foundation website to learn more about the foundation and its programs.
