Last Saturday, my husband and I attended the Kaleidoscope of Hope Foundation's (KOH) Annual Dinner and Awards Ceremony at Doolan's in Spring Lake.
A few years ago I was a member of the Board of Directors of KOH. This dinner gave me the opportunity to catch up with my KOH friends and gave me a chance to speak one-on-one with the researchers that KOH supported. This year KOH gave two research grant awards.
The first award went to George Preti, PhD who works at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. The Center is a non-profit institute that conducts basic research on taste and smell. Dr Preti's research is titled " A Novel Aproach to Ovarian Cancer: Screening Using an Interdisciplinary Investigation of Its Volatile Signature". Dr Preti will collaborate with researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and the project will study the volatile chemical signature of blood from women with ovarian cancer and healthy women. Dr Preti was very willing to discuss his projects and invited me to visit his lab. I hope to provided a more detailed explanation of his research which includes dogs, a gas chromatograph to study head space above blood samples and nano technology.
The second grant award went to Britta Weigelt , PhD and Herbert Vargas, MD from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Their research is " Benchmarking Intra-Tumor Heterogeneity in Ovarian Cancer : Linking in-vivo Imaging Phenotypes with Histology and Genomics." I had a very interesting discussion with Dr Weigelt after the awards ceremony. She explained how there are DNA differences between ovarian cancer cells found in the same tumor. In other words even though a woman might have tumors with a pathology of epithelial ovarian cancer , the cells might be different genetically. I knew that there were various types of ovarian cancer but had not heard that the genetic makeup within a tumor could be different. This may explain why chemotherapy may work on some of the cells in a tumor but not others since their genetic makeup is different. And this may explain why some women recur quickly.
I am so happy that KOH continues to support OC research and that I can support KOH.
For more information on their research please see the awards page on the KOH website.
Dee
Every Day is a Blessing!
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