HMS Prof. Wins Research Award

Harvard Medical School Professor Edward E. Harlow was awarded $100,000 last Wednesday by the Melanoma Research Foundation to fund his work developing therapeutic approaches to treat melanoma, a skin cancer that kills thousands of Americans each year.

The award—the Established Investigator Grant—will support Harlow’s research for two years.

Harlow was one of five to be selected from an applicant pool of 60 for this award after a scientific advisory committee looked over all the proposals and chose the most promising ones, according to the Tim Turnham, the foundation’s executive director.

“Our goal in funding is to find new treatments that will help patients live longer and better,” he said.

Harlow, who was been studying melanoma for about three years, is working to find an indirect way to treat this cancer by targeting genes that support harmful mutations, a method originally proposed in 2005 by Medical School Professor William G. Kaelin, Jr.

Harlow is focusing on genes supporting MITF—a gene critical to melanoma growth—and hopes to find a way to control the gene in order to stunt tumor growth.

In collaboration with David E. Fisher, the chief of dermatology and director of the Melanoma Program at Massachusetts General Hospital, Harlow plans to screen about 500 genes to identify which ones MITF depends on.

“In our experiment we’re trying to deal with a cell that has cancer...and find things that are essential to the original mutation and attack that,” Harlow said.

Fisher said he is looking forward to working with Harlow and having a “cross-campus” collaboration between Mass. General and Harvard’s Department of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology.

According to Professor Andrew B. Lassar, a member of the Department of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology, Harlow’s “work will not only deepen our understanding of the signaling pathways that are necessary for cancers to grow but hopefully will lead to therapeutic interventions.”