September 29, 2006
Dana-Farber researcher receives prestigious NIH Director's Pioneer Award
Rosalind Segal, MD, PhD
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute researcher Rosalind Segal, MD, PhD, has been awarded a 2006 NIH Director's Pioneer Award, a prestigious five-year, $2.5 million grant to support her research of the way complex sugars work to maintain neural stem cells in the developing and adult brain. Segal was one of only 13 researchers to receive the grant.
The Pioneer Award, established three years ago, is a key component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Roadmap for Medical Research. The program supports exceptionally creative scientists who take highly innovative approaches to major challenges in biomedical research.
"The 2006 Pioneer Award recipients are a diverse group of forward-thinking scientists whose work could transform medical research," said Elias A. Zerhouni, M.D., director of the NIH. "The awards will give them the intellectual freedom to pursue exciting new research directions and opportunities in a range of scientific areas, from computational biology to immunology, stem cell biology, nanotechnology, and drug development."
Segal is a member of the Department of Pediatric Oncology at Dana-Farber and Children's Hospital Boston and an associate professor of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. She earned a PhD degree in cell biology from Rockefeller University in 1985 and a medical degree from Cornell University Medical College in 1986.
Her laboratory focuses on the biology of brain tumors by probing the complex molecular machinery of the developing brain. Segal's research aims to understand the mechanisms critical for normal development of the nervous system and how deregulated proliferation, migration, and survival of cells can cause brain tumors and other neurological diseases. Her prior honors include the Klingenstein Fund Robert Ebert Fellowship and a fellowship from the Claudia Adams Barr Program in Innovative Basic Cancer Research.
Segal will use the Pioneer Award funding to support her novel research of the manner in which growth factors in the brain fuel the proliferation of nerve stem cells, both in normal development and in the origins of brain tumors. Her proposal is an application of a new field, "glycomics," the study of molecules called proteoglycans – a combination of a protein and a sugar – that can affect the activity of growth factors in addition to other functions, many of them not fully understood.
"Rosalind's studies on pediatric brain cancer have the potential to open entirely new avenues for anticancer drug development," says Charles Stiles, PhD, who heads the neuron-oncology program within the Department of Cancer Biology.
NIH selected the 2006 Pioneer Award recipients through a special application and evaluation process. After NIH staff determined the eligibility of each of the 465 applicants, the first of three groups of distinguished experts from the scientific community identified the 25 most highly competitive individuals in the pool. The second group of outside experts then interviewed the 25 finalists at NIH in August 2006.
The Advisory Committee to the Director, NIH, performed the final review and made recommendations to Zerhouni based on the evaluations by the first two groups of outside experts and programmatic considerations.
"In addition to supporting outstanding research, the Pioneer Award is an innovation in its own right. It is one way we are exploring of funding unconventional ideas that are promising but might not fare well in the traditional peer review system," Zerhouni noted.
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (www.dana-farber.org) is a principal teaching affiliate of the Harvard Medical School and is among the leading cancer research and care centers in the United States. It is a founding member of the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center, designated a comprehensive cancer center by the National Cancer Institute.
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