4 Harvard Medical School Researchers Receive Damon Runyon Awards

Funding provides early-career support to advance cancer research

Awards and Recognitions

2 min read

Narrow pipettes hanging upside down from a high-throughput screener
High-throughput screening equipment at HMS. Image: Sam Ogden

Four Harvard Medical School researchers have received awards from the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation. Two have been named Damon Runyon Fellows, and two have received the Damon Runyon-Dale F. Frey Award for Breakthrough Scientists.

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The four-year Damon Runyon Fellowship encourages promising young scientists to pursue careers in cancer research by providing them with independent funding to investigate cancer causes, mechanisms, therapies, and prevention. Each fellow receives $300,000 in funding over four years.

The new fellows from HMS are:

  • Saket Bagde, HMS research fellow in biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology at Boston Children’s Hospital, with his sponsor Timothy Springer, the HMS Latham Family Professor of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Boston Children’s. Bagde studies how hemidesmosomes — adhesive structures that anchor epithelial cells to the underlying base layer — interlock in healthy tissues and how they disassemble in cancerous tissues, allowing tumor cells to spread in the body. This work has the potential to support the development of personalized cancer therapies based on patient-derived tissue samples.
  • Teng Gao, HMS research fellow in pediatrics at Boston Children’s, with his sponsor Vijay Sankaran, the HMS Jan Ellen Paradise, MD Professor of Pediatrics at Boston Children’s. Gao aims to identify the molecular and cellular factors involved in the regeneration of hematopoietic stem cells — stem cells in the bone marrow that give rise to all other blood cells and have provided cures for previously incurable diseases — as well as possible targets for enhancing their regenerative potential. This work could enable significant improvements in stem cell-based therapies for cancer treatment.

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The Damon Runyon–Dale F. Frey Award for Breakthrough Scientists recognizes current Damon Runyon fellows whom the foundation considers most likely to make paradigm-shifting breakthroughs that transform the way we prevent, diagnose, and treat cancer. The foundation provides an additional $100,000 in funding.

The HMS recipients are:

  • Xin Gu, HMS assistant professor of cell biology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Gu studies how cells regulate the destruction of proteins without using the typical ubiquitin tag, which signals that a protein should be transported to the proteasome for digestion and recycling of amino acids. His lab has discovered a pathway, the midnolin-proteasome pathway, that helps degrade key proteins involved in cancer. Gu is exploring how this pathway might be used to develop new treatments, especially for blood cancers, by targeting specific proteins that drive disease.
  • Qinheng Zheng, an incoming member of the faculty of biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS. While some cancers can be treated with drugs that block overactive growth signals, there are currently no effective treatments for cancers caused by the loss of tumor suppressor genes. Zheng investigates how to reactivate impaired tumor suppressor genes, which could lead to the development of new treatments for a wider range of cancers and address resistance to existing therapies.

Adapted from Damon Runyon Foundation press materials.