CAREER builder
NSF award to Junghae Suh backs breast cancer research

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff

It’s been a thrilling year for Junghae Suh with two new arrivals, even though both were highly anticipated.

	JUNGHAE SUH

Most important was the birth of her first child, a son named Fin, on Christmas Day. “He has a set of vocal cords, and he’s not afraid to use them,” said Suh, a Rice assistant professor in bioengineering who has set up shop in the new BioScience Research Collaborative.

Also important is the official arrival of a CAREER award, a prestigious grant from the National Science Foundation. Suh knew it was coming some time ago, but the announcement this month kicks her lab’s work on new strategies to fight breast cancer into high gear.

Back on campus after maternity leave, Suh and her group are diving headlong into the project in association with Jonathan Silberg, an assistant professor of biochemistry and cell biology at Rice, to create a virus-based gene therapy delivery technique keyed to breast cancers.

Biomolecules to deliver therapeutics to specific cancers have been around for a while, Suh said. “But the big problem with any kind of delivery technology is to achieve specific targeting. Breast cancer cells look very similar to normal breast cells, so the difference is very minimal,” she said.

Suh’s group will pursue a strategy that extends the reach of biomolecular targeting. “Biomarkers are rarely truly unique,” she said. “They exist everywhere; it just happens that maybe there’s slightly more of them on the breast cancer cells. So it’s really difficult to achieve specificity by targeting a single biomarker.

“But what if we can recognize two? Then the specificity will increase.”

Suh plans to develop viruses with levels of encryption that can be “unlocked” only by recognition of multiple cell-surface biomarkers. The viruses can then release their cancer-killing payloads into tumors. “I think our approach is unique,” she said. “And the combination of everything we’ve put together is very unique. I haven’t seen anything like this, so it’s very exciting.”

Seed money for the project came from a Hamill Innovation Grant awarded to Suh and Silberg in 2008.

The CAREER award, the second to a Rice professor this year (the first was to chemist Stephan Link), goes to young scholars seen as likely to become leaders in their fields. Only about 400 such awards are granted each year. The five-year grant to Suh is for $440,000.