Grant helps lure back cancer research star
Amos discovered gene that raises risks for cigarette smokers
A pre-eminent scientist who discovered a gene that makes people more likely to get hooked on cigarettes and develop lung cancer is returning to Houston.
A pre-eminent scientist who discovered a gene that makes people more likely to get hooked on cigarettes and develop lung cancer is returning to Houston with the help of a major grant from the scholar recruitment program of Texas’ cancer agency.
Christopher Amos, formerly at MD Anderson Cancer Center and currently at Dartmouth College, will join Baylor College of Medicine this fall as head of its Institute for Clinical and Translational Research. He also will develop a program that seeks to identify people at risk of developing cancer based on their genetic makeup and other factors.
“It’ll be like being a kid in a candy store,” Amos said about the coming return. “I still have a lot of friends in Houston, from MD Anderson to the UT School of Public Health.”
Dr. Melissa Bondy, associate director of Baylor’s Dan L. Duncan Comprehensive Cancer Center, called Amos a “big-time recruit” for Baylor. Currently the interim director of Dartmouth’s Norris Cotton Cancer Center, Amos worked at MD Anderson for 19 years before leaving five years ago to become head of Dartmouth’s Center for Genomic Medicine.
Amos’ recruitment package was one of the biggest grants awarded this week by the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, the $3 billion
agency that provides funds for cancer research. The agency awarded 60 grants totaling $102 million.
Amos was awarded one of two $6 million “established investigator” grants. The other would bring Dr. Carlos Arteaga, an expert on targeted therapy and breast cancer, from Vanderbilt to UT Southwestern. In addition, 12 first-time tenure-track researchers each were awarded $2 million packages to come to Texas.
Building a reputation
In all, the 14 recruits would get $36 million, the latest outlay under CPRIT’s scholar recruitment program, which has allowed Texas to raid other top institutions for powerhouse scientists, “rising stars” and promising firsttime faculty.
Among those first-time faculty members receiving the latest grants are scientists from laboratories at Harvard University, Stanford University, Johns Hopkins University, the California Institute of Technology, the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences, Dana Farber Cancer Center and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
Eight years after the agency was launched, CPRIT has so far paid out $436 million for 135 cancer researchers, eight of them members of the National Academy of Sciences, the nation’s most distinguished organization of scientists.
The war chest has helped Texas build a reputation as a hotbed of cancer research rather than just the home of MD Anderson, considered the world’s No. 1 cancer center. The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, in particular, has used CPRIT grants to elevate its cancer center’s reputation.
Famous recruits
The recruits have brought into Texas roughly $227 million in peer-reviewed grant money from national funding sources.
The program’s most famous recruit is James Allison, the Lasker Awardwinning scientist who discovered a natural brake on the immune system, then developed a drug to release the body’s defenses to attack the patient’s tumor, the new paradigm of cancer treatment. In 2012, he was recruited to MD Anderson from Memorial Sloan Kettering with a $10 million recruitment grant.
But the program has lured other big names too: Sean Morrison to UT Southwestern; Dr. Matthew Ellis to Baylor; Frank McKeon to the University of Houston; Dr. Gail Eckhardt to UT Austin; and K.C. Nicolaou to Rice University.
Amos is another wellknown figure, mostly due to his 2008 discovery at MD Anderson identifying the inherited gene variations that raise smokers’ chance of getting lung cancer by as much as 80 percent compared to tobacco users without the genes. The research also found those with the variants are more likely to become addicted to nicotine.
“It’s a kind of a doublewhammy gene,” Bondy said at the time. Amos is expected to start at Baylor sometime this fall.
More money to give
The discovery marked the first time researchers had found a common genetic variant that influences the risk of getting cancer.
The largest grant was a $9 million package awarded to ViraCyte LLC, a Texas Medical Center company spun out of Baylor immunotherapy research. The award will fund the company’s efforts to improve outcomes of stem cell transplants using immune cells manipulated to target viruses that can cause cancer.
All told, CPRIT has now awarded 1,189 grants totaling more than $1.89 billion, nearly two-thirds of the $3 billion assault on cancer Texas voters overwhelmingly approved in 2007 and the agency began giving out in 2009. The agency has until 2023 to award the rest of the money.