True collaborative translational team science is the cancer research idea supported by Stand Up to Cancer (SU2C) with the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR). This SU2C initiative calls for the collaboration of the best basic science and clinical investigators joined into “Dream Teams” to concentrate on an area of cancer that has enormous potential to save lives. Our focus is on women’s cancers: breast, ovarian and endometrial.

Despite recent advances in therapies in these cancers, current studies indicate that breast, ovarian and endometrial cancers have frequent gene mutations regulating a cancer pathway, the PI3K pathway. The basic scientists and clinicians on our SU2C Dream Team are the pioneers that discovered the PI3K pathway and validated its significance in human cancers.

Our goal is to discover approaches that will predict patients who respond to PI3K pathway inhibitors. Our success will contribute to accelerating drug approvals and, ultimately, provide techniques for personalized cancer treatment that can be incorporated into standard practice.

We are enrolling patients in clinical trials to discover, and then predict which breast, ovarian and endometrial cancer patients will benefit from these therapies.

Our Dream Team represents an exceptional collaboration of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (Boston), MD Anderson Cancer Center (Houston), Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (New York), Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (Boston), Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center (New York), Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center (Nashville), Vall d’Hebron Institute of Oncology (Barcelona), and Massachusetts General Hospital (Boston).

Our PI3K Dream Team has taken the unprecedented approach of collaborating not only across our multiple institutions, but also across multiple diseases. Through SU2C’s encouragement, our hope is that through our exchange of materials and ideas by our Dream Team working in breast, ovarian and endometrial cancers, we will accelerate the cure of all three. As a result, our work may demonstrate a new paradigm for women’s cancers clinical trials and collaborative translational team research.

Oncology Times article featuring a patient on one of our PI3k Dream Team's Clinical Trials. (article)

Watch Lew Cantley's appearance in a segment on 'Sugar' on 60 Minutes.  There is a definite correlation between eating sugar that results in an insulin spike that can serve as a catalyst to fuel certain types of cancers. (video)   

[Disclaimer:  Please pardon the commercials that were embedded in the broadcast.]

Stand Up to Cancer Scientific Summit (video)

2012 SU2C SCIENTIFIC SUMMIT (photo)

A signature paper from our Stand Up to Cancer PI3K Team and chosen for evaluation by Faculty of 1000. (more)

SU2C's PI3K Pathway Dream Team (watch video)

Meet SU2C's Scientists: PI3K Dream Team
In the second of five in SU2C's Dream Team series, PI3K Team Leaders Cantley and Sawyers talk about the science behind their project focusing on women's cancers.
(watch video)

Progress Report
Team progress over the first nine months and looking ahead.
(watch video)

Big Think
Special Series on Breakthroughs in Cancer
(watch video)

In Search of a Target, In Search of a Cure

(watch video)