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Late last year, the developer of the world’s first and so far only dengue vaccine warned that people who had no prior exposure to the mosquito-transmitted virus before being vaccinated were at heightened risk of severe disease should they subsequently be infected by a different dengue strain.

The warning from Sanofi Pasteur — and the World Health Organization recommendation that only those with prior exposure be vaccinated — was based on a new analysis of data from three clinical trials that led to the vaccine’s licensure in late 2015. Biostatisticians from Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center contributed new statistical methods as part of this new analysis, which was published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The most common mosquito-borne disease in the Americas, dengue flourishes in tropical and subtropical countries. Any one of four closely related dengue viruses can cause a flu-like illness as well as severe dengue disease that is potentially lethal. Those at highest risk of developing severe disease are people who are infected a second time by a different dengue virus strain. In those not previously exposed, one hypothesis is that the vaccine may have had a similar effect as a first infection, raising the risk that a later infection would be severe and more likely to require hospitalization.

Chris Pope blends easily into the lunchtime crowd, just another person enjoying a sandwich while a cold Northwest drizzle spatters the brewpub windows. His firm handshake and direct demeanor hint at his work as a salesman and a neat gray goatee frames his easy smile.

You’d never guess that in his blood are hiding certain immune cells that have launched the development of a new high-tech strategy for treating cancer.

Just 30 miles south of the waterside spot where Pope and his wife were eating, scientists in a lab at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center were growing immune cells reprogrammed with weaponry borrowed from his.

Would it be possible, those scientists wondered, to genetically engineer the immune systems of other patients to act like Pope’s did when it eradicated his stage 4 melanoma?

From a ‘birthmark’ to a cancer diagnosis

Pope’s ordeal started with, of all things, some routine deck maintenance.

A mark on the edge of his left foot he’d assumed for years was a birthmark started bleeding as he was working. He figured it was nothing, but to be on the safe side, he decided to get it checked out.

Though a tumor may seem to be a mess of overgrown cells, it cannot spread through the body and spark new tumors without coordinating two different processes: moving cells to a new area, and then increasing their number. In work published today in Developmental Cell, scientists at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center have identified a protein called endophilin A3 that, unexpectedly, can help tumors balance these competing needs.  

“When we think about cancers that metastasize, one of the basic principles of what these cells are able to do is they can move really fast to places they shouldn’t go, and then they grow at rates they shouldn’t be growing,” said first author Dr. Raj Poudel, a postdoctoral fellow jointly mentored by Dr. Jihong Bai and Dr. Robert Eisenman, the study’s senior authors.

“What this study does is find something that can affect both those processes, but with very intricate regulation ... So that’s the exciting part, it drives both of the aspects of what we consider physical metastasis.”

Uganda Cancer Institute Executive Director Dr. Jackson Orem once told an African colleague about the partnership he had forged with Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. His friend replied, “It’s like you’re collaborating with someone on the moon!”

He wasn’t just talking about the 8,800 miles and 11 time zones that separated the institute in Kampala, Uganda, from the one in Seattle. At the time the alliance began, U.S.-style cancer research and treatment seemed out of this world.

Orem made a rare visit to the Fred Hutch campus last week to celebrate the partnership’s 10^th anniversary and reflect on the distance traveled over the last decade.

“Through cooperation and collaboration, by building capacity through training and technology transfer, with engagement with our partners and our government, we are showing that we can have a sustainable cancer program,” he said. “Despite the fact that we are collaborating with people who are living on the moon, we have shown that we can do some work on Earth.”