Surgeon honored for new lung cancer treatment

Staff report

Dr. David R. Jones, assistant professor of surgery and a member of the U.Va. Cancer Center's Thoracic Oncology Program, has won the prestigious Career Development Award for translational lung cancer research from the American Association for Cancer Research.

The two-year award of $100,000 followed a national competition and was the only one awarded this year. Translational research is designed to take important clinical problems, like treating lung cancer, into the laboratory and then "translate" the laboratory findings into meaningful care plans for patients.

"Lung cancer is the most common cancer in the United States and kills more people annually than breast, colorectal and prostate cancers combined," Jones said. "Unfortunately, lung cancer is very resistant to chemotherapy and radiation. We have identified a novel protein, called nuclear factor kappa B, which chemotherapy activates in lung tumors. Once activated, this protein sets off signals in the tumor cell that tell it to survive at any cost, thus helping to make the tumor cell resistant to chemotherapy.

"In the laboratory we have been able to show that when activation of this protein is inhibited, lung cancer cells die very quickly and with lower, less toxic doses of chemotherapy. So instead of giving a patient higher doses or more frequent chemotherapy and radiation, this research is designed to prevent tumor cells from becoming resistant to chemotherapy," he said.

Jones will receive the award at the AACR's annual meeting in New Orleans in March. In addition to the AACR grant, Jones's research is supported by a grant from the National Cancer Institute of more than $600,000.