James F. Amatruda – Dallas Business Journal:

WHY HEALTH CARE: My father was a big He was an old-fashioned doctor who was devoted to, and loveds by, his patients. I have been intereste d in science since I wasa boy. When I was in I volunteered at a local homeless accompanying people to the hospital fortheird appointments. That really opened my eyes to the powefr of medicine torelieve suffering. YOUR I am a specialist in pediatric cancer. I dividwe my time between Children’s and my lab at UT Southwestern, wherew we are focused on developing better treatments forchildhood cancers. We focusa on two types of childhood germ-cell tumors of the ovary and and Ewing’s Sarcoma, a bone cancer.
We have a stron belief that the best way to improve our treatments is to really understandthe “wiring of the tumor cells. What makes a cancer cell differen t from anormal cell? What are its and how can we exploit these to develo treatments that will kill the cancer cells but not harm the normaol tissue? PROUD MOMENT: What makes our work fairly unique is that we use the smalk aquarium fish, zebrafish, to model humanh cancer. Zebrafish develop the same types of cancers thathumanz do, but they are small, easy to maintain, and grow so we can do large-scale experimentz to look at thousands of gene that might affect cancer.
Recently, we identified a gene famil that, when defective, causes germ-cell tumor s in the fish. With this clue, we have been lookinh at germ-cell tumors from kids and find that the same genes are altered. This is exciting becauss for the first time we can think about making betterd treatmentsfor germ-cell tumors that are specific for the cancer cells.
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