Cancer prevention at the molecular level

February is National Cancer Prevention Month, a time to reflect not only on how cancer can be prevented, but how science is transforming the way it is detected, treated and understood.

At the School of Molecular Sciences at Arizona State University, faculty researchers are harnessing chemistry and molecular science to push the boundaries of drug discovery, early detection, personalized diagnostics and prevention — work that is already changing lives.

The stories below highlight just a few of the School of Molecular Sciences researchers whose work spans the cancer research pipeline, from prevention and early detection to drug discovery and treatment. Together, they reflect how molecular science is advancing more precise, effective approaches to one of medicine’s most complex challenges.

For Dr. Joshua LaBaer, a professor in the school and the executive director of ASU's Biodesign Institute, the path to cancer research was anything but planned.

When he finished medical school, he was confident about two things: Cardiology held no appeal, and oncology was not in his future. That certainty unraveled during his internship and residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, where working closely with cancer patients reshaped his sense of purpose.

Today, much of LaBaer’s research focuses on breast cancer. Among his lab’s most promising innovations is a blood test designed to detect immune responses associated with early-stage disease — a potential game changer for earlier diagnosis, when treatment can be most effective.

LaBaer’s lab is also a launchpad for the next generation of scientists. One of them is Lydia Sakala, ’18 BS in biochemistry, who came to ASU from Zambia with a deep interest in HIV research, a pressing challenge in her home community. After completing her undergraduate studies and briefly shadowing physicians in an emergency room, Sakala returned to ASU to pursue doctoral research.

She initially applied to LaBaer’s lab to help with COVID-19 research. Then she took his Biochemistry of Cancer course — and everything shifted.

“The more I learned about cancer, the clearer it became that better treatments were needed,” Sakala says. “Now, I’m grateful to play a small role in this massive undertaking.”

Professor Sidney Hecht, director of the Center for Bioenergetics in the Biodesign Institute, studies diseases caused by defects in the body’s energy production processes. His expertise in molecular mechanisms has had a profound impact on cancer therapy, including his role in developing Hycamtin, a drug used to treat ovarian and lung cancer, and in uncovering the mechanism of the anti-tumor agent bleomycin.

Hecht emphasizes that drug discovery is rarely straightforward. It requires collaboration among chemists, biologists and medical researchers, often beginning with the identification of new cellular pathways and strategies to correct biological dysfunction. Promising compounds are tested in the laboratory and living systems, analyzed for their chemical and biological properties, and — if they survive rigorous scrutiny — advanced into clinical trials.

“These activities are extremely time consuming and very expensive,” Hecht notes. “Prioritizing which efforts to pursue is arguably the greatest challenge in drug discovery.”

Professors Petra Fromme, Raimund Fromme and Nicholas Stephanopoulos, working with Professor Tim Marlowe and colleagues at the University of Arizona’s College of Medicine in Phoenix, have developed a custom-designed peptide that targets cancer in a fundamentally different way.

Their findings, published last year in Nature Communications, describe a candidate molecule that prevents cancer cells from anchoring themselves — a critical step that allows tumors to grow, multiply and spread. Rather than blocking kinases, as many traditional treatments do, this therapy disrupts the physical survival mechanisms cancer cells rely on to metastasize.

The approach shows promise for aggressive and hard-to-treat cancers, including melanoma, breast, pancreatic and lung cancers — offering new hope where options are often limited.

Together, these stories reflect the heart of cancer research at the School of Molecular Sciences: curiosity-driven science, interdisciplinary collaboration and a shared commitment to prevention and better outcomes.

This February, as we recognize National Cancer Prevention Month, these researchers continue to prove that progress against cancer begins at the molecular level — and reaches all the way to patients and communities around the world.