Jing H. Wang, MD, PhD, investigator at the University of Colorado Cancer Center is the recipient of a prestigious American Society of Hematology Scholar Award
“If you have DNA breaks, then your genome isn’t very stable and it’s ripe for cancer,” says Jing Wang, MD, PhD, University of Colorado Cancer Center investigator and assistant professor of immunology at the CU School of Medicine. Wang recently received a prestigious grant from the American Society of Hematology (ASH) to explore processes that create these breaks.
The Scholar Award’s $150,000 over three years is especially important for young researchers like Wang who may struggle to compete with established researchers for grants from the National Institutes of Health, especially in an economy in which only about 13 percent of grants submitted to the National Cancer Institute are funded.
“As a junior researcher, you’re just establishing your lab and getting your people. You need preliminary data before you can apply to the NIH – it takes a while to accumulate,” says Wang. The ASH Scholar Award seeks to bridge this gap between the end of a researcher’s training and the emergence of a researcher’s own, fundable project.
In this case, Wang’s project may help science understand the mechanisms that underlie blood cancers.
Other researchers have shown that an enzyme called activation-induced deaminase (AID) creates DNA lesions – weak spots in the DNA – which other proteins can then convert into breaks. These breaks allow chromosomes to rearrange themselves, like putting back together a broken spaghetti noodle with the segments in a new order. Unfortunately, in the B-cells Wang studies, these “chromosomal translocations” can and do frequently give rise to leukemia and lymphoma.
Generally, no DNA breaks means no blood cancers.
Using this grant, Wang will study how problems with AID leads to DNA lesions, and how DNA repair mechanisms can sometimes fail to fix this damage.
“We’re focusing on the basic mechanism of how this works,” Wang says. In two or three years, not only may this grant have birthed knowledge about the basic biology of blood cancers, but it may have birthed the career of a committed cancer researcher as well
