Newswise — LOS ANGELES (Feb. 20, 2025) — Ze’ev Ronai, PhD, a prominent cancer investigator and director of the Translational Research Institute at Cedars-Sinai, has received an Outstanding Investigator Award from the National Cancer Institute. This is the second time that Ronai has collected the award, which supports cancer researchers working on biomedical, clinical and behavioral innovations and discoveries.
The award, recognizing both past achievements and the promise of future work, comes with approximately $4.2 million over seven years to support Ronai’s continuing work to study how melanoma cells evade cancer therapies and the body’s immune system.
“Imagine the cancer as the navigation system in your car,” Ronai said. “We expect it to take the main highway, where we have therapies that can stop it from spreading. But instead, it finds side roads so that it can evade those therapies and metastasize. Melanoma is especially prone to spreading, and our biggest challenge in treating patients with this cancer is metastasis. We are working to find the side roads the disease is using so we can stop this spread and improve patient survival.”
Recently, Ronai has been studying rewired signaling in melanoma cells, and this will be much of his focus for the duration of the award. This rewired signaling, which has gone awry in cancer cells, interferes with the breakdown of old, damaged or abnormal cell components as well as the normal process of cell death.
“These rewired signals make cancer cells behave differently than normal cells would,” Ronai said. “The cells do not die; instead they survive therapies. One of the key components that our work will focus on is the role of these abnormal signals in life and death of cancer cells.”
In carrying out his work, Ronai plans to take full advantage of the unique cross talk that exists between clinicians and investigators at Cedars-Sinai.
“This cross talk allows close collaboration that benefits all parties engaged in cancer research,” Ronai said. “When I speak with Cedars-Sinai clinicians, I see that the ‘bench-to-bedside-and-back’ concept has truly come to fruition here.”
Shlomo Melmed, MB, ChB, executive vice president of Medicine and Health Sciences and dean of the Medical Faculty, said that teamwork between investigators and clinicians is essential to forging new paths in cancer prevention, treatment and precision medicine.
“This well-deserved award recognizes the value of Dr. Ronai’s outstanding research productivity and how well it dovetails with our mission to advance cancer care and improve outcomes for our patients,” Melmed said. “We look forward to the discoveries and innovations that are sure to ensue from these efforts.”
Ronai, who during his career has collaborated with investigators and clinicians across the country and internationally, believes that his work will have implications beyond melanoma.
“Over the past decade we have made important contributions to advance our understanding and treatment of prostate, breast and pancreatic cancer. I expect the work we do in the next few years will similarly lead to advances against a variety of cancer types,” Ronai said. “My hope is to redefine the future of therapy based on our discoveries.”
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