Innovative New Cancer Treatment Idea Earns $1 Million Prize

This week the first ever Gotham Prize for Cancer Research was awarded to Alexander Varshavski, the Smits Professor of Cell Biology at the California Institute of Technology. Set up to be an annual award, the Gotham Prize grants the winner $1 million to use towards innovative ways of tackling cancer treatment.

Along with two hedge fund managers, Harvard Medical School's Dr. Gary Curhan developed the prize. Of Varshavski, he said: "many of the current treatments have potential side effects and are not specific to the cancer. The one that he is proposing is very specific and has the potential to have few side effects, or even none."

Joel Greenblatt and Robert Goldstein, fellow prize organizers, worked to create the award as a result of federal funding for cancer research falling flat. "We believe that making progress in cancer research means sharing ideas and encouraging out of the box thinking," said Greenblatt.

Varshavsky's cancer treatment idea is nothing if not out of the box. Called "deletion-specific targeting", it is based on replacing the DNA found missing in cancer cells that are found in their healthy counterparts. The treatment, he said in a statement, "involves in a nutshell, the finding of a genuine Achilles Heel of cancer cells, i.e., their potentially vulnerable feature that won't change during tumor progression."

He went on to add that "a deletion-specific targeting based drug is envisioned as a sophisticated molecular device that enters a cell, ‘examines" it for the presents of cancer-specific DNA deletions, and thereafter ‘decides' whether it entered a cancer cell, in which case the drug activates its warhead and kills that cell."

While Varshavsky has won other awards in the past, including the Lasker award in 2000 for discovering a gene known as ubiquitin, active in many different types of cells, the people behind the Gotham award didn't take his previous achievements into consideration.

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