Cure Alveolar Soft Part Sarcoma International (iCureASPS)

I obtained an M.D. and a Ph.D., and am trained in both medical oncology and basic science research. My interest in cancer goes all the way back to medical school, when I was rotating at a small hospital in upstate New York and was completely amazed by what I saw: young people dying from metastatic cancer with essentially nothing real to offer them. By the time I began my oncology fellowship at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston several years later, I was sure that we must be improving, but I was wrong. On my first day of fellowship training, we were shown a graph of survival from metastatic cancer going back to the 1960s, and it was remarkable how little we had progressed. Patients, on average, were living a few months longer, but when you looked at the overall survival curves several years after diagnosis, we were doing amost next to nothing: most patients with metastasis were dead within 3 years.

After my clinical fellowship, I began to search for postdoctoral research positions, a "prelude" to starting my own research group in the future. And I was very clear about two things: 1) I wanted to study metastasis, and 2) I wanted to study it in a way radically different than what had been done over the past 50 years. It is for those reasons that I chose to do my postdcotoral training in Leonard Zon's lab at Children's Hospital Boston and the Harvard Medical School: he was starting to study cancer using zebrafish, a model very well known for its incredible genetic toolbox, ability to study drugs, and capacity for "seeing" what was happening due to imaging technologies.

The zebrafish, for me, seemed like the perfect way to study the question I was interested in: why does metastatic cancer kill you? Conceptually, there are two ways to go about the problem. First, you can make educated guesses about potential mechanisms, and then test each of those mechanisms to see if they kept the animal alive with their cancer. Second, you could simply study huge numbers of animals, identify the rare ones that are able to live with their cancer, and then figure out why that animal is able to do so. Both approaches are completely practical in the zebrafish, becasue I can study somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 fish at a time. Statistically, my likelihood of finding a few that are completely tolerant of their tumor is very high, far higher than if I were trying to do this type of study in a mouse.

For all of these reasons, in my own lab at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, I am studying how metastasis kills the zebrafish, and why some animals are completely tolerant of their cancer and do not die from it. This is with the expectation that what we find in the fish is broadly applicable to all species that die from cancer.