Dr Daniel Gough receives US Department of Defense fellowship

Hudson Institute cancer researcher Dr Daniel Gough has received a three-year US Department of Defense fellowship to examine the intracellular causes of gastric cancer.

The US Department of Defense ‘Peer Reviewed Cancer Research Program Career Development Award’ supports the research of an early career researcher.

Dr Gough’s work focuses on signalling within cells that becomes overly activated when these cells become cancerous.

Currently, in conjunction with Professor Brendan Jenkins from CiiiD, he’s examining a biochemical pathway called STAT3 pathway and how it enters the mitochondria, or the “powerhouse” that provides energy to a cell, to make cells within the gastro-intestinal tract turn cancerous.

“STAT3 is over-expressed or hyper-activated in more than 50 per cent of human tumours and correlates with poor overall survival rates. Despite this link, STAT3 has proven very difficult to target with anti-cancer drugs to date,” Dr Gough said.

“Recently we identified a pool of STAT3 that enters the mitochondria and controls key mitochondrial functions that are specifically important in tumours but not in normal tissue.”

The next step for Dr Gough, Professor Jenkins and their teams is to see whether currently available anti-cancer drugs can be used in treating this ‘pool’ of STAT3.

“We have two major research goals in my lab. The first is to understand the fundamental mechanisms by which STAT3 enters the mitochondria and controls its activity, and to design strategies to target this activity therapeutically,” Dr Gough said.

“The second goal of our research is to use animal models and patient derived xenografts to identify key vulnerabilities in a range of tumours," he said.

Dr Gough said the ultimate aim is to identify new strategies for targeting gastric cancer that will open up new treatment options for patients and ultimately increase survival rates.