Tsuchikama wins Dunn Collaborative Research Award
The Gulf Coast Consortia announced that Kyoji Tsuchikama, PhD, associate professor in the Texas Therapeutics Institute at the Brown Foundation Institute of Molecular Medicine for the Prevention of Human Diseases, is a 2025 winner of the John S. Dunn Foundation Collaborative Research Award.
Tsuchikama won the award for his collaborative project “Directed Antibody-Drug Conjugate Targeting KDM4A as a Novel Therapy for Neuroendocrine Neoplasms.” Tsuchikama partnered with Guocan Wang, MD, PhD, and Yuan-Hung Lo, PhD, both members of The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center UTHealth Houston Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, for the project.
“Winning this award is a great honor and an exciting opportunity to collaborate with outstanding external cancer experts,” Tsuchikama said. “It also provides a valuable platform to further demonstrate and disseminate our linker technology, a model for how academic collaboration can accelerate the translation of innovative cancer biology and chemistry into meaningful cancer therapies.”
The group’s project studies high-grade neuroendocrine tumors and carcinomas, which grow rapidly, spread to other organs, and usually don’t respond well to current treatments. The collaboration brought together experts in cancer biology and targeted drug development in order to design a more precise and effective therapy to treat these cancers.
“I’m truly excited to partner with Dr. Tsuchikama through the generous support of the John S. Dunn Foundation,” Wang said. “Our preclinical data show strong promise for targeting KDM4A in highly aggressive neuroendocrine prostate cancer (NEPC), and emerging evidence suggests that KDM4A plays a broader role in other neuroendocrine tumors as well. This collaboration will allow us to advance the development of more effective agents targeting KDM4A and move one step closer to new therapeutic strategies for patients.”
“Our goal is to validate KDM4A as a promising therapeutic target for neuroendocrine cancers and create a targeted therapy that acts like a ‘guided missile,’” Tsuchikama said. The lab’s treatment uses an antibody that recognizes DLL3, a protein found almost exclusively on neuroendocrine tumor cells, to deliver a drug that blocks KDM4A directly to the cancer, enabling it to spare healthy tissue. The group will test the therapy alone and with chemo therapy in both tumor samples and preclinical models to hopefully develop safer and more effective treatments — and bring new hope to patients with these cancers.
Launched in 2009, the John S. Dunn Foundation Collaborative Research Award Program continues to build the collaborative environment of the Gulf Coast Consortia and fund projects with high potential for impacting human health. The program fosters new, exemplary interdisciplinary and interinstitutional engagement in the quantitative biomedical sciences by providing research grants of up to $100,000 total to support research and preliminary work for two years.