Professor Ramzi M. Mohammad, Ph.D., Hematology & Oncology and Internal Medicine, of the Wayne State University School of Medicine and the Karmanos Cancer Institute, has been awarded a $1.3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop a new treatment for pancreatic cancer.

The prestigious RO1 grant, which funds research for five years, will be used, said Dr. Mohammed, to introduce “a new and novel concept to treat this deadly disease.”

Often considered the most deadly form of cancer, pancreatic cancer is a malignant tumor within the pancreatic gland. Each year, more than 33,000 people in the United States are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Only four percent of patients diagnosed with the affliction are expected to survive. Depending on the extent of the tumor at the time of diagnosis, the prognosis is generally regarded as poor. Few victims are still alive five years after diagnosis, and complete remission remains extremely rare.

Pancreatic cancer can be called a silent disease because many times the symptoms go unnoticed until the cancer is in the advanced stage. If there are early indications and symptoms, they are often mistakenly attributed to another condition.

In earlier research, Dr. Mohammad developed a method that allows the growth of human pancreatic tumor cells within the body of a mouse. He has demonstrated that human tumor cells can be injected into a mouse’s pancreas, and the tumor can than be successfully treated. Essentially, Dr. Mohammad is treating human tumors in a non-human host, and finding success in treatment of those human pancreatic tumors. The unique model preserves the human cell structure within the body of the mouse.

With the newly funded NIH grant, Dr. Mohammad plans to test the efficacy of new drug combinations on the human tumors within the mice. Standard pancreatic cancer therapy relies on drugs like gemcitabine and cisplatin, highly-toxic drugs that damage patient DNA. His techniques are expected to enhance the gemcitabine killing effect and thus improve the efficacy of standard chemotherapy, Dr. Mohammad said.

Heavily involved in preclinical and clinical research, Dr. Mohammad has also developed seven cell lines for cancer research in an effort to find therapies for lymphoma and leukemia. Through his path-breaking research, Dr. Mohammad has published numerous papers in specialized journals such as Cancer Research and Clinical Cancer Research.

More than 50 U.S. university and hospital-based academic neurology departments and MS centers presented papers at the meeting. The top five centers in terms of the numbers of papers presented included: State University of New York-Buffalo with 16 papers, WSU with 12 papers, Brigham & Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, with 11 papers, Mayo Clinic with 10 papers and the Neuroimmunology Branch, a National Institutes of Health branch, with 9 papers.

Six of WSU’s 12 papers were investigator initiated, and six were as a result of multi-center phase II and III clinical trials. Several related publications are already in press or being peer-reviewed for publication. Omar Khan, M.D., professor of Neurology, is director of the Multiple Sclerosis Clinical Research Center & Neuroimaging Laboratory at Wayne State University School of Medicine.

Matcheri S.Keshavan MD., WSU professor of Psychiatry, recently received a four-year National Institute of Mental Health grant totalling $ 2.65 million dollars beginning this month. The grant includes a subcontract to University of Michigan. This grant, titled Bipolar and Schizophrenia Consortium to parse Intermediate Phenotypes (B-SNIP) is one of 5 sites throughout the US to receive this initiative; the other sites are the Yale University, University of Maryland, University of Illinois, and the University of Texas, Dallas. The main goals of the study are to characterize the physiological and neuroanatomical endophenotypes, i.e. biomarkers and their molecular genetic underpinnings in a large, multi-site series of patients with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and their relatives. An understanding of the genetic and neurobiological basis of these two disorders will eventually help clinicians make better diagnoses based on the underlying pathophysiology rather than the current reliance on purely descriptive, clinical measures. Elucidating the pathophysiology and causation of these disorders will also lead to more novel, hypothesis-driven treatments.

Pravin Goud, M.D., Ph.D., a fellow in the WSU Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology Division of Reproductive Endocrinology & Infertility, was recently awarded a $30,000 competitive grant by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine-Ortho Women's Health. The grant, "Oocyte Maturation and aging in Endometriosis,” will investigate the role of free radicals in the causation of oocyte abnormalities in endometriosis.

Dr. Goud works in close collaboration with Michael Diamond, M.D.; Bernard Gonik, M.D.; Anuradha Goud, Ph.D.; and Husam Abu-Soud, Ph.D. Their research on the role of nitric oxide in oocyte aging has previously featured in the journal Biochemistry and has received national and international awards, including the Gordon Research Conference Award in 2005.