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If he had his way, Dr. Kapil N. Bhalla would clone the vast genetic diversity
of underwater life.
“You see these Nova and National Geographic shows with giant squid covered with cells that change in milliseconds to blend with the environment. What is the science behind that? Think about all the incredible life that can live 2,000 feet below the surface of the ocean, the biodiversity that exists there. We could be on the cutting edge of biotechnology for the next two millennia if we invested in that now.”
His enthusiasm is irrepressible as he contemplates the need to understand life at this fundamental genetic and molecular level. Perhaps that is because his ultimate goal is to help save it.
The 53-year-old founding director of the Medical College of Georgia Cancer Center lies awake at night, his mind racing with the possibilities of building a center that does just that.
“Cancers will be known very differently 25 years from now. Right now, they are classified by how they look under a light microscope. But we are beginning to understand that cancer originates because of certain molecular problems, aberrations, deregulated molecular pathways with specific points that are mutated, over-expressed or no longer beautifully controlled.
“All biology in nature is very regulated, with controlled processes and chemical reactions. In cancer, deregulation doesn’t kill cancer cells but allows them to acquire features that are actually stem cell in nature, so they just divide, survive and eventually invade and spread.”
He wants to know how a cancer cell acquires features that put it on autopilot to grow. His studies in leukemia and breast cancer have focused on understanding this cell regulation gone wrong. The plan is to find cancer-selective targets to help make it right.
Molecular readjustments will ideally yield better, safer treatments and perhaps even cures for a disease that is among the nation’s top-five killers for every age category except infancy.
The opportunity to build the clinical and basic discovery teams and supporting infrastructure brought Dr. Bhalla to MCG Aug. 1 from the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute in Tampa, Fla., where he was scientific director of the Hematologic Malignancies Program at this National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of South Florida.
MCG’s new Cancer Research Center is the hub of focused, expanding scientific, clinical and educational initiatives Dr. Bhalla will direct in Augusta. He is wasting no time. His appointment was announced late April, and by early May, he and Dr. Anand P. Jillella, chief of the Section of Hematology/ Oncology, had arranged for space on the fifth floor of MCG Medical Center to temporarily house treatment and clinical research.
Plans call for a permanent treatment/clinical research facility within two years, possibly right across Laney-Walker Boulevard from the Cancer Research Center and connected by a crosswalk. Such proximity will help patients sense and see the work on their behalf, Dr. Bhalla believes.
“We are not interested in the chemical reaction just for the beauty of the chemical reaction. We want to see how we can harness this knowledge and apply it to the welfare of our patients,” says Dr. Bhalla. “Are we ever going to be able to put it in a bottle or a pill? Sometimes, very pure science initially will seem like pie in the sky. Then, over the years, things change. We have to dream the impossible to make it possible at some point. We have to create a team of people who are in it for the fun of science and, beyond that, making the lives of others better.”
Such momentum requires the effort of many.
Chief among them:
- The Georgia Research Alliance, a private, nonprofit corporation that
works with business leaders and research universities to develop a
technology-rich economy for the state. The alliance provided matching funds
for the chair Dr. Bhalla holds and will complete a floor in the new research
facility.
- The Georgia Cancer Coalition, which leads cancer initiatives statewide
and has committed funds for nine new Distinguished Cancer Clinicians and
Scientists in addition to the 11 scholars it already helps support at MCG.
All told, Dr. Bhalla has packages to recruit 25 to 30 basic scientists,
physician scientists and clinical scholars.
- The state of Georgia, which provided $1.4 million for planning and
design and $8.6 million to construct the Cancer Research Center.
- MCG Health, Inc., which annually transfers margin funds to support MCG’s
research and educational missions.
- Georgia’s congressional delegation, which secured $1.5 million in
federal funding from the Department of Health and Human Services for
construction and equipment.
- The Atlanta-based Robert W. Woodruff Foundation, Inc., which provided $2
million.
- MCG’s Physicians Practice Group, which financed $30 million of the
center’s construction debt through bonds issued by the Richmond County
Development Authority, which MCG will repay through annual payments.
- Gov. Sonny Perdue’s office and the Georgia Legislature, which committed $5 million in fiscal 2006 budget to MCG cancer research. An additional $5 million was appropriated by the General Assembly in fiscal 2007. Funds may be renewed for an additional three years.
The support overwhelms the new director. “It’s going to happen,” Dr. Bhalla
says. “We will be lean, mean and focused,” starting with cancers such as
head/neck, lung, breast, leukemia, prostate and perhaps cervical. “We want to
start modestly so we are known to be the best for a few things. Then, as we
build resources, we can tackle more.”
The center will explore immunology and immunotherapy, cell signaling, prevention and control and developmental therapeutics.
Dr. Bhalla’s assessment of MCG’s existing expertise shows strengths in immunotherapy, cell signaling and molecular chaperones. But with Comprehensive Cancer Center designation by the National Cancer Institute as an ultimate goal, much work remains.
Dr. Bhalla, who was involved in early studies of one of the first small-molecule therapies, Gleevec, and newer ones for Gleevec-resistant leukemia patients, wants to bring more early-phase clinical trials to MCG and its patients. He plans to carry renderings of the new clinical facility as a trump card when meeting with drug company executives about these studies.
“I give a drug to Gleevec-resistant patients who could be dead in a few weeks, and they are playing golf a month later because you have eliminated billions of their leukemic cells,” he says. “That is our mission, to bring those and other trials of targeted new agents here.”
Each success will build on another: Patients’ tumors will find their way to the lab to identify molecular changes and targeted therapies.
To help ensure he never forgets the real bottom line, Dr. Bhalla intends to keep treating patients at least a half-day per week. “Everything gets changed and is often stressful in the life of a cancer patient and his family,” he says. “We need to help them.”
Toni Baker
Dr. Bhalla...… began Aug. 1 as founding director of the MCG Cancer Center and the Cecil F. Whitaker Jr., M.D./Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Cancer. … is a hematologist/oncologist and principal investigator on $4.7 million in research grants from the National Cancer Institute and Department of Defense to evaluate molecular targets to treat breast cancer and leukemia. … is a member of the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s Scientific Program Committee on Developmental Therapeutics and a former member of the society’s Scientific Program Committee Breast Track. … chairs the Neoplasia Committee of the American Society of Hematology, has chaired the National Institutes of Health’s Developmental Therapeutics Study Section since 2004 and previously served on the NIH’s Experimental Therapeutics Study Section. … has received an American Cancer Society Career Development Award and Leukemia Society of America Fellow and Scholar Awards. … is associate editor of Cancer Research and a member of the editorial boards of Molecular Cancer Therapeutics, Clinical Cancer Research, Cancer Biology and Therapy and Cell Cycle. … is a 1976 graduate of the University of Delhi’s Maulana Azad Medical College in India and completed internships in pathology and internal medicine and a residency in internal medicine at St. Michael’s Medical Center in Newark, N.J. … completed a postdoctoral fellowship in hematology/oncology at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York. … previously served on the faculties of Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, the Medical University of South Carolina, Emory University and the University of Miami. He was associate director of Translational Sciences at Emory and chief of the Division of Clinical and Translational Research at the University of Miami. … is married to wife Kathy and has two children |