Research led by Duke Cancer Institute’s Jen-Tsan Ashley Chi, MD, PhD could have implications for the successful treatment of certain types of ovarian, breast and kidney cancer.
The American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) has named Jen-Tsan Ashley Chi, MD, PhD, as co-winner of the Molecular Cancer Research Michael B. Kastan Award for Research Excellence on behalf of his all-Duke research team for their paper — A TAZ-ANGPTL4-NOX2 Axis Regulates Ferroptotic Cell Death and Chemoresistance in Epithelial Ovarian Cancer.
Chi is co-director of the Cancer Biology Research Program at Duke Cancer Institute and directs his own lab within the Duke Center for Genomic and Computational Biology that's focused on the adaptation and response of cancer cells to various stresses in the tumor micro-environment. He's an associate professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology, an associate professor in the Department of Pharmacology & Cancer Biology, an assistant professor in the Department of Medicine, and an assistant professor in the Department of Radiation Oncology.
The Michael B. Kastan Award for Research Excellence is formally bestowed on the first or corresponding author of an article in Molecular Cancer Research (the flagship AACR journal for fundamental cancer research discoveries) that's had a significant impact on the fields represented by the journal, but all co-authors are named as recipients of the award in recognition of the importance of team science. The MCR editor-in-chief and two additional editors for the journal select the award recipient (s) — prioritizing those articles that “have the potential to shift paradigms, inspire translational activity, and raise awareness of new scientific areas” and which are “representative of the journal in terms of originality/ novelty, scientific/clinical merit, and/or impact/significance."
Chi’s co-authors on the winning paper, which was published in the January 2020 issue of MCR, include: Wen-Hsuan Yang, PhD (first author of the paper, then a PhD student in the Chi Lab); Zhiqing Huang, MD, PhD (assistant professor in Obstetrics and Gynecology and a DCI member); Jianli Wu, BS (lab research analyst 1 in the Chi Lab); Chien-Kuang C. Ding, MD, PhD (with Duke at time of publication; now a pathology resident with the University of California, San Francisco); and Susan K. Murphy, PhD (associate professor in Obstetrics and Gynecology and a DCI member).