The Center for Cancer Research (CCR) and NCI at Frederick recently had the honor of hosting Professor Dr. Her Royal Highness Princess Chulabhorn Mahidol of Thailand. Her Royal Highness has a special interest in scientific research related to the use of natural products for treating disease. The purpose of her visit was to discuss the work on natural products being undertaken at NCI at Frederick.

When Alison Rattray and colleagues in the Gene Regulation and Chromosome Biology Laboratory (GRCBL) examined a mutant yeast cell they had isolated in a screen, they noticed something strange. The DNA exhibited a “very specific, but weird, rearrangement,” she explained.

The NCI-funded Nanotechnology Characterization Laboratory—a leader in evaluating promising nanomedicines to fight cancer—recently renewed its collaboration with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the National Institute of Standards and Technology to continue its groundbreaking work on characterizing nanomedicines and moving them toward the clinic.

A new breed of lab animals, dubbed “glowing head mice,” may do a better job than conventional mice in predicting the success of experimental cancer drugs—while also helping to meet an urgent need for more realistic preclinical animal models. The mice were developed to tolerate often-used light-emitting molecules, such as luciferase from fireflies and green fluorescent protein from jellyfish.

Three representatives of METAvivor visited NCI at Frederick on April 13 to meet and tour with Balamurugan Kuppusamy, Ph.D., staff scientist in the laboratory of Esta Sterneck, Ph.D., senior investigator, Laboratory of Cell and Developmental Signaling, Center for Cancer Research. The purpose of the visit was to learn more about Kuppusamy’s research. Kuppusamy is a recipient of a $50,000, two-year grant awarded by METAvivor to study the role of the CEBPD-FBXW7 signaling pathway in inflammatory breast cancer.