天美传媒

As Scientific Director, Chi Van Dang oversees the execution of Ludwig鈥檚 scientific strategy to advance the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of cancer, with a special focus on the operations and staffing of the Lausanne, Oxford and San Diego Branches of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research. He also works to align these efforts with those of the six independent Ludwig Centers across the U.S. to further cultivate collaboration within Ludwig鈥檚 global research community. Dang鈥檚 Ludwig laboratory is housed at The Wistar Institute, where he is also a professor.
 
Dang is best known for his elucidation of the molecular signaling pathways and mechanisms governing the unusual metabolism of cancer cells, which require vast quantities of energy and molecular supplies to sustain their wild proliferation. His laboratory was the first to show that a master regulator of gene expression named MYC鈥攁 gene whose mutation or aberrant expression is associated with many types of cancer鈥攁lters the utilization of a key sugar in cancer cells.

This body of work, which explained a hallmark of tumor metabolism known as the 鈥淲arburg effect鈥�, bolstered the hypothesis that cancer cells can become addicted to their reengineered signaling pathways and dependent on particular nutrients. Dang and his colleagues have shown that disrupting those pathways could be a powerful approach to treating cancer and identified drug targets to that end. Therapies based on this work are today in various stages of clinical development.

Dang came to the U.S. from Vietnam in 1967 and went on to obtain a Ph.D. in chemistry from Georgetown University. Dang subsequently obtained an M.D. from Johns Hopkins University and completed a fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco, before returning to Hopkins. There he rose to become Vice Dean for Research and Director of the Hopkins Institute for Cell Engineering before moving on to direct the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine鈥檚 Abramson Cancer Center. He was recently appointed to the Blue Ribbon panel that provided strategic guidance to U.S. Vice President Joe Biden鈥檚 Cancer Moonshot initiative. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Medicine, fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and currently chairs the National Cancer Institute鈥檚 Board of Scientific Advisors."

Dr. Russell Jones is a leading expert in the study of cancer metabolism and immunology. As professor and program lead of the Metabolic and Nutritional Programming group at Van Andel Research Institute, his work seeks to uncover how cancer cells fuel themselves through metabolic interactions, with the ultimate goal of developing new cancer therapeutics.  

He earned his B.Sc. with honors in Biochemistry and his Ph.D. in Medical Biophysics from the University of Toronto, where he studied in the lab of Dr. Pamela S. Ohashi. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship in the lab of Dr. Craig B. Thompson at University of Pennsylvania in 2008, he accepted a position as an assistant professor in the Department of Physiology and Goodman Cancer Research Centre at McGill University. He was subsequently promoted to associate professor in 2014 and, in 2017, also took on the role of director of the Metabolomics Core Facility at Goodman Cancer Research Centre. He joined Van Andel Research Institute’s Center for Cancer and Cell Biology in 2018 as program lead and a founding member of its Metabolic and Nutritional Programming group. Dr. Jones has earned numerous accolades throughout his career, including a New Investigator Award from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Bernard and Francine Dorval Prize from the Canadian Cancer Society, and several teaching awards at McGill University. He was named a William Dawson Scholar in 2014 and elected to the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada in 2015. He also serves as a reviewer for a number of journals, including Cell Metabolism, Immunity, Nature, Nature Immunology and Science.