Newtown Native Receives $1.6 Million NIH Award

By Nancy K. Crevier

Dr Conor Evans, a 1998 Newtown High School graduate who was recently named assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, traveled on Thursday, September 30, to a symposium in Washington, D.C., where he was one of only 33 scientists, out of thousands who applied, to receive the National Institute of Health (NIH) Directors’ New Innovator Award. The award, in the amount of $1.6 million over five years, will allow Dr Evans to bring his research concerning why current treatments are ineffective in treating metastatic ovarian cancer closer to his goal of new therapeutic regimens that could improve the survival rate of women diagnosed with late stage ovarian cancer.

“It’s an honor to receive this award,” said Dr Evans, “and it opens so many doors for my research that would have been closed. This allows me to now hire some of the brightest scientists in the world, and to buy and develop instrumentation that will further the research.” Currently, he is working only with one graduate student, Alex Nichols.

“What it means to me,” he continued, “is about a thousand new opportunities. [Receiving the Directors’ New Innovator Award] has the potential to make me a ‘lightning rod’ for people wanting to do their PhD work at Harvard, or who want to do postdoctoral work at Harvard.”

Dr Evans, who received his undergraduate bachelor of science degree in chemical physics from Brown University in Providence, R.I., in 2002, and who did his graduate work at Harvard University in Boston, was quick to acknowledge his earlier education at Newtown High School, where teacher Donald Lamberty first introduced him to physics and electromagnetism.

“That interest got me to where I am today,” said Dr Evans. He also credited his parents, Cliff and Denise Evans of Newtown, with inspiring him to succeed. “My dad is a mechanical engineer, and that’s where I got my love of science,” he said, “and my mother always taught us to look out for other people. They were both instrumental in my career.”

He is particularly pleased to have received the award due to the difficulties scientists experience in getting grants. “It is especially difficult for young investigators, like myself, to get grants. There’s a dearth of funding for younger scientists, especially if you are stepping outside of the bounds of what has been done,” he said. The average age that a scientist gets his or her first major grant, as Dr Evans understands it, is often not until the mid 40s.

Dr Evans’s proposal is to look first at how in ovarian cancer regions of hypoxia correspond to areas that are effectively treated by chemotherapy.

“The theory is that cells that are hypoxic [lacking sufficient oxygen] are the ones that go on to become treatment-resistant diseases. We want to know, can we identify which cells are hypoxic and how that correlates with treatment efficacy.”

The second part is to develop new therapeutic regimens that can take out those hypoxic cells.

“I’m not the first scientist to study this,” stressed Dr Evans. As a fellow at Harvard, he had the opportunity to study metastatic ovarian cancer with other scientists. “As a fellow, we found that when you look at metastatic ovarian disease, there are factors that prevent therapies from working. One is hypoxia.”

Cancer cells grow so fast that they do not get enough oxygen. That seems like a good thing on the surface, said Dr Evans, but in actuality, cells in a hypoxic environment enter “survival mode” and do “whatever they must to survive.” Cancer cells with just a little oxygen — hypoxic — are protected from chemotherapeutics. The chemotherapeutics work quickly on fast growing cells — not cells that have essentially shut down to survive.

About 70 percent of women diagnosed with ovarian cancer are in an advanced stage of the disease, Dr Evans said, and for late stage diagnosis, rarely does chemotherapy work.

“For a lot of women with an advanced disease, they are left with little recourse. My area of research is looking at ways to better fight therapeutically resistant ovarian cancer,” he said. It is the metastatic, widespread cancer in the body from which women die, he said, not usually the cancer for which she is diagnosed or for which she is initially treated.

He is thrilled to know that he has the funding now to delve more deeply into his research. Instrumentation developed will hopefully include a means of synthesizing new probes to peek into tumors and identify which cells are hypoxic, and which cell are not, he said. His work is more “bottom-up” that the usual “top-down” method of looking at the whole body and breaking it down into smaller components.

“Bottom-up says ‘Let’s look at the smallest part — cells — and see how they work.’ We know we have to be able to take images very quickly, for instance, because patients can’t remain still for long,” Dr Evans said

Going on to develop therapeutic regimens to destroy hypoxic cells, should it be found that they are the contributing factor to therapy efficacy resistance, is important to his research, he said.

“It is not enough to say, ‘You have cancer and these cells are hypoxic,’” explained Dr Evans “I had a mentor once who told me ‘Detection by itself is not enough.’

“For so many women, ovarian cancer is a death sentence,” Dr Evans said. “If I can improve the survival rate by even a tenth of a percent, that’s thousands of women. I love science and what I do. But here is a real chance that I can make a difference out there. To hear that I have received the NIH Directors’ New Innovator Award — I’m still overwhelmed.”