Welcome to Dr Wong's Journal

One of the most enjoyable things I do is to go out and share our excitement about what we're doing, and the progress that we are making.

Last Thursday was different, since I got a chance to speak to High School students at Will East's Career day. Unlike my other talks, I did something today that I rarely get to do; talking about myself. It is a little weird to talk about your past, your career choices and why I decided to not only become a doctor, but also a researcher. It is certainly the "road less travelled" and to paraphrase Jack Frost, I wondered about the other paths that diverge in the woods - and how things might have been different not just for myself, but for all the people I touch. What a beautiful life.

We have one of the best lab groups I have ever worked with. In addition to their impressive skills, these are just good folks. You can't ask for better, and it makes everyday a joy to be at work. I must be using up all my good Karma in this life.

How do you define someone who is a good scientist? I define it from the point of view of someone who looks after cancer patients, where the need is so great, and the task so difficult. I define it as; "someone who is not afraid to ask the important question", since that individual is so well trained that they have no fear of the task, but are focused on answering the question. Just like a good hockey player will turn his/her entire focus on scoring a goal without wondering about the skating, the stick or the ice. Indeed the same is true of a well trained scientist, since they aren't worried about the techniques of electrophoresis, DNA sequencing, arrays or cloning genes - getting the answer to a fundamental question becomes everything.

Here are some questions that we're working on:

How does your body allow the tumor to grow ?

In fact, if I inject tumor cells into you, it won't take, since your body will reject it out of hand. Our major thrust is in understand processes like angiogenesis, immunomodulation and tumor-matrix interactions.

How do we make a scar around a tumor ? Do you know that tumors don't grow in scars... it is like a natural barrier, thus, can be make a scar like a moat around tumors

We can already cure a consistent percent of patients with immunotherapy - what "wrong" with those patients in which immunotherapy works and what's "right" about those patients that are cured from it? I run one of the largest, if not the largest, interleukin-2 programs in the country, and this is one of the big questions we're trying to answer. We are already curing people with widely metastatic cancer, so why can't it be 100 percent ?

Modern research is based on a foundation of biochemistry, molecular, and cell techniques. This blog will begin a series of videos showing what really happens at the bench top. There will be videos on electrophoresis, Western Blotting and Polymerase Chain Reaction amongst others. The series is currently being taped, and so stayed tuned!

One of our major endeavors is to find molecules that may target the tumor and spare the body. We don't know what these will look like yet, but our work has led us down the path of small molecules (as opposed by large molecules such as antibodies). An example of a small molecule appears below -



just to give you a sense of dimension. One immediate application is to use this to target and image tumor blood vessel. We have previously published on linking these homing molecules to micro bubbles to image tumors (see: Weller GER, Wong MK, Modzelewski RA, Lu E, Klibanov AL, Wagner WR, Villanueva FS. Ultrasonic Imaging of Tumor Angiogenesis Using Contrast Micro bubbles Targeted via the Tumor-Binding Peptide RRL. Cancer Research 65(2) 533-539, 2005 )

Charles Chen successfully defended his thesis work in June, and has gone off to do postdoctoral work in pharmacology and drug development at the UB Center for Excellence. That means that he won't be far from us, since they are located just a block away, literally across the street from the Hospital. .....You can leave, but you can never leave !! Congrats to Charles, his work will be published in two highly ranked journals; Molecular Cancer Therapeutics and the Journal of Urology.

It is always hard to have someone you have come to respect so much leave your shop .... but such is the way of the world. I remind myself that success is measured by the success of the folks that have been in your lab, and that the more successful they are, the further they can fly.