SMOKING OUT TOBACCO - Moores Cancer Center

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Community Leaders JOIN FOUNDATION The Rebecca and John Moores UCSD Cancer Center is pleased to announce the recent election of three distinguished leaders from the San Diego community to the UCSD Cancer Center Foundation Board. Each new member brings a wealth of talent and commitment to the Cancer Center as a member of our volunteer leadership. L. Reneé Comeau is senior vicepresident and a regional manager with California Bank and Trust. She attended University of New Hampshire, and graduated from San Diego State University with a Bachelor’s degree in business. She is actively involved with the Child Abuse Prevention Foundation and the Polinsky Children’s Center Foundation, and is a member of other community BOARD Chair Martha P. Shumaker, a seasoned professional in fund raising, has recently joined the Cancer Center Foundation Office as associate director of development. She will be working with Cancer Center clinicians to identify and develop new avenues of support. “We’re delighted to have Martha as part of our team,” Martha Shumaker said Sarah Godfrey, Director of Development for the UCSD Cancer Center Foundation. “Her background and experience covers a broad spectrum in fund raising, including donor relations, public relations, organizations, including the National Charity League, St. Germaine Auxiliary and the San Diego Opera. Comeau and her husband, Terry Gulden, reside in La Jolla. Edward Shonsey recently moved to San Diego to join Diversa Corporation as senior vice president. Shonsey brings more than 20 years of experience in the development and commercialization of new products in the pharmaceutical, agricultural, chemical processing and industrial markets. He also remains heavily involved in global education issues, serving on the Board of Business and Higher Education Forum. He is an avid fly-fisher and sea kayaker. Shonsey and his wife, Molly, will co-chair the Celebrity Chef’s Gala in 2004. Meet Martha Shumaker… of the nominating committee Frank Goldberg (left) and Board President Cinda Lucas (center) welcome new board members (l-r) L. Reneé Comeau, Edward Shonsey and Kimberly Simpson Querrey. Kimberly Simpson Querrey has over 20 years of concurrent experience in the manufacturing field and teaching at the university level in engineering and chemistry. She has held numerous positions in production and operational management as well as positions in environmental health and safety for Fortune 500 companies. She consults for several clients in various aspects of operational management and strategic development, and teaches part time at UCSD Extension Services. Her experience includes management of chemical manufacturing and secondary smelting operations. Querrey and her husband, Louis Simpson, reside in Rancho Santa Fe. NEW ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR OF DEVELOPMENT marketing, management, organization, and special events.” She was a founding member of the San Diego Crew Classic, serving as its marketing and public relations director for five years, and most recently as its capital campaign director. For the previous six years, she was the associate director of development and alumni relations for California Western School of Law, as well as its interim director of development for two years. She has held positions with the San Diego Natural History Museum, the San Diego Historical Society, the March of Dimes, and the San Diego Wild Animal Park She is an active community volunteer, having served in Junior League, the Makua Auxiliary to Children’s Home Society, and the Institute for Arts Education, among others. She earned a Bachelor’s degree in communications from Northwestern University. Cancer Center News 8
Department of Defense SUPPORTS OVARIAN CANCER RESEARCH The Department of Defense Ovarian Cancer Research Program has selected Cancer Center member Stephen Howell, M.D., to receive one of its highly sought-after “Idea Development” awards. These awards are designed to support innovative research concepts to prevent, detect, and treat ovarian cancer. Dr. Howell’s award of more than $550,000 will support his research over the next 3 years to determine why and how ovarian cancer cells become resistant to chemotherapy. Scientists have long known that ovarian cancer cells that have become drug resistant do not accumulate the drug well, but until recently they have not known how the drug moves into and out of cells. Dr. Howell’s team, and others, discovered that cisplatin, one of the most important drugs used in the treatment of ovarian cancer, gets into and out of the cell by hitching a ride on molecules called transporters that evolved to manage the cellular accumulation of copper. Copper is an essential trace metal, but it is quite toxic. So nature has developed a complex system of transporters that get copper into the cell and protect the cell from its toxic side effects while it is delivered to the enzymes that require it. Current research suggests these same molecules transport cisplatin. “The focus of our grant is a transporter called CTR1, the major carrier for bringing copper into the cell,” said Dr. Howell. “We, and others, have developed evidence that it is also the major transporter for cisplatin. We’re working to determine how this transporter works, and whether it is defective in ovarian cancer cells that have become resistant to cisplatin.” Understanding what is wrong with cisplatin accumulation in resistant cells may lay the groundwork for Dr. Howell and other physician-scientists like him to develop strategies for preventing or overcoming cisplatin resistance in patients with ovarian cancer. “This is a particularly exciting time to be working on the problem of drug resistance,” said Dr. Howell, professor of medicine. “Having discovered that the copper transporters control sensitivity to these drugs, we are now in a position to bring the enormously powerful tools of modern cellular and molecular biology to bear to understand how they work, and to translate this understanding into improved therapy for ovarian cancer patients.” SMOKING OUT TOBACCO Continued from Page 5 mental restrictions against smoking influenced their decision to cut back. Perhaps most significant, he also found that those who smoked five or fewer cigarettes a day increased the chances that they would be successful at quitting the next time they tried. Zhu’s works in progress include a one-year pilot grant from the Cancer Center to study whether different ways of presenting the opportunity to get a CT scan of their lungs will affect smokers’ willingness to get one, and whether getting a clean bill of health from a CT scan will negatively impact their motivation to quit smoking. He is also working with low-income smokers in a three-year study that is attempting to determine the optimal amount of supportive counseling that people need in order to quit smoking successfully using the nicotine patch. The work has policy implications because low-income smokers qualify for free nicotine patches if they receive counseling first, and the study findings will help identify how to enhance the cost-effectiveness of public expenditure for the best outcome. HOW POLICY SHAPES BEHAVIOR Tobacco and the big picture — the interface between science and public policy — is the primary interest of David Burns and his group, and one that directs them to diverse areas. Recently this has included a study of harm reduction in low-tar and –nicotine cigarettes, which demonstrated that these products haven’t reduced the risk of smoking. “We’re now involved in trying to examine questions of how one could go about studying whether harm is reduced with some of the newer tobacco products that are coming on the market,” he says. Another focus of the group is how policy-based interventions — such as restrictions on where people can smoke, increases in cigarette taxes and changing norms — determine smoking behavior on a population basis over time. In addition, the group is collecting data on tobacco print advertising over the last century and relating it to changes in smoking behavior, particularly among adolescents and African Americans. Burns’s team is also using modeling techniques to project future lung cancer risks associated with current changes in smoking behavior, and changes in smoking behavior that might occur with increases in tobacco control funding. Most recently, the group published a monograph that examines whether or not current tobacco control strategies are leaving behind people who have more difficulty quitting and require different approaches. From helping individuals spurn tobacco to forecasting the large-scale consequences of policy shifts, on every level, the Cancer Center remains one of the most influential forces countering one of the nation’s greatest public health problems. Written by Sarah Lifton, a freelance writer. 9 Cancer Center News
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SMOKING OUT TOBACCO - Moores Cancer Center

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