A new grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National Cancer Institute will help continue promising cancer research studies by Drs. Carl Luer and Cathy Walsh at Mote Marine Laboratory.
The new $335,000 two-year grant will provide partial support for research being done by Dr. Luer, a biochemist, and Dr. Walsh, an immunologist. The goal of their work is to characterize certain compounds secreted by shark immune cells that the research team has already demonstrated inhibit the growth of a variety of human tumor cell lines.
The active material that Drs. Luer and Walsh seek to identify appears to work using a mechanism that targets tumor cells rather than normal, healthy cells. “Receiving this new grant is exciting because it allows us to move to the next level of research – determining what this substance is and how it preferentially recognizes and inhibits tumor cells instead of normal cells,” said Dr. Luer.
The studies are complex, said Dr. Walsh. “We’re hoping to isolate and purify the active components. If they continue to show promise, that will be great but we still have a lot of work ahead of us.”
Luer and Walsh have spent their professional careers at Mote trying to find out why sharks and rays rarely get cancer and what that might mean for humans who do. Dr. Luer joined Mote in 1979 where his work initially focused on studying whether sharks and rays really were resistant to cancer. Later studies focused on shark immunology, with the idea that understanding how shark immune systems functioned would lead to new insights about why the animals might be resistant to disease.
When Dr. Walsh joined Mote in 1991, her background as an immunologist opened up new areas of study, including determining what kind of immune cells sharks have and how they function, where the immune cells are produced and how all these functions were regulated.
The Ann and Alfred Goldstein Foundation provided seed funds to begin these studies in 2001 and the Polly Loomis Endowment and the Vernal W. and Florence H. Bates Foundations have provided long-standing support for Mote’s cancer research. Today, Mote Marine Laboratory has two U.S. patent applications pending that are related to this research effort.
Other collaborators on the project include Dr. Clay Smith of the British Columbia Cancer Agency (formerly Director of the Blood and Marrow Transplant Program at the Moffitt Cancer Research Institute) and Drs. Budd Bodine, Thomas Scott and Yonnie Wu of Clemson University and the Clemson University Proteomics I
