[Ip-health] Wall Street Journal: Gotham Prize Honors New Cancer Research

Tue Apr 1 06:22:01 2008

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120701217876278991.html

Gotham Prize Honors New Cancer Research
By ELIZABETH BERNSTEIN
April 1, 2008; Page D3

The first annual $1 million Gotham Prize for Cancer Research was
awarded to Alexander Varshavsky, a professor of cell biology at the
California Institute of Technology. Dr. Varshavsky was honored for a
new approach to the treatment of cancer that takes advantage of
changes in the DNA of cancer cells.

The Gotham Prize was created in 2007 by two hedge-fund managers from
private-investment firm Gotham Capital, Robert Goldstein and Joel
Greenblatt, as well as Gary Curhan, a professor at Harvard Medical
School and associate professor of epidemiology at Harvard School of
Public Health.

The prize -- which was designed to spur the sharing of ideas on cancer
research -- was the subject of a Wall Street Journal article last fall
in a series of stories about innovative efforts to raise money for
medical research. The award was modeled on an online investors club
Mr. Greenblatt created that encourages the sharing of investing
strategies.

The award goes to the person who submitted the best new cancer-
research idea to the prize's Web site, www.gothamprize.com1, by the
end of December. Applications were reviewed by an advisory board of
six prominent researchers, and approximately 125 were chosen to be
posted to the prize's Web site.

In order to encourage anyone to submit ideas, not just cancer
researchers, the Gotham prize doesn't require applicants to present
evidence that their premise will actually work -- or that they are
capable of seeing the work through. "The selection process is based on
the quality of ideas, not the qualification of the person," says Dr.
Curhan. "Anyone is eligible."

Dr. Varshavsky has previously won the General Motors Sloan Prize in
Cancer Research and the Griffuel Prize in Cancer Research. He was
awarded the Gotham Prize for a new approach, termed deletion-specific
targeting, which seeks to identify the lack of certain DNA segments in
cancer cells, and to target and kill only the cancer cells that are
missing this DNA.

The prize money is earmarked by researchers for personal use. Dr.
Varshavsky says he plans to allocate a portion of his prize to support
his research lab, but he hasn't decided how much.

In addition to the Gotham Prize, the $250,000 Ira Sohn Conference
Foundation Prize in Pediatric Oncology was awarded to Mark Carol, a
neurosurgeon and consultant to various health-related companies, for a
new approach to radiation therapy that proposes delivering low-energy
X-rays to kill cancer cells while at the same time protecting healthy
cells and tissue.

Dr. Carol, who has founded several medical-device companies, says he
will use his prize money to pay off debt and to fund researchers at
several universities to study his idea.

Write to Elizabeth Bernstein at elizabeth.bernstein@wsj.com2
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Thiru Balasubramaniam
Geneva Representative
Knowledge Ecology International (KEI)
thiru@keionline.org

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