NEW ORLEANS -- , has a warning for cancer researchers: Don't sacrifice basic research in the push to bring new treatments to the bedside.
Weinberg delivered that message after receiving the 13th Annual AACR Award for Lifetime Achievement in Cancer Research during a ceremony at the meeting here.
It was reminiscent of his 10 years before at AACR's annual meeting in Washington DC, when the cancer research pioneer then used the occasion of receiving AACR's Kirk A. Landon-AACR Prize for Basic Cancer Research as a bully pulpit "to passionately criticize the sad, sorry, politicized state of investigator-initiated research funding, and to proclaim the potential for a 'lost generation' of young cancer researchers."
Weinberg -- founding member of the , professor of biology at MIT, and director of the -- is widely known for his discoveries of the first human oncogene and the first tumor suppressor gene.
The Lifetime Achievement award honors an individual who has made significant fundamental contributions to cancer research, either through a single scientific discovery or a body of work, according to the AACR, which honored Weinberg specifically for:
"His seminal contributions to cancer research and cancer biology, which are foundational in establishing the current era of molecular oncology. From his discovery of the first human oncogene to his delineation of the connection between epithelial-mesenchymal-transition and the metastatic spread of cancer, his extraordinary work exemplifies his unrelenting commitment to discovery and has left an indelible mark on the field of cancer research."
In an exclusive interview with MedPage Today, Weinberg said, "There has been the unarticulated assumption in the lay community and among patient advocates that we've spent so much time and resources -- decades of time so many billions of dollars -- trying to figure out the basic causes of cancer and we need some results now for clinical advances."
"Indeed," he continued, "there is the further assumption that essentially we already know enough about the basic pathogenic mechanisms of cancer and consequently it's time to apply them."
Weinberg called this point of view "ill advised and poorly informed" because it does not take an overview of the history of how drugs and antibodies have been made to be clinically useful.
It also assumes that there is nothing more to learn through basic research unfettered by specific research goals.
"There are still some simple and fundamental problems where we still have almost no understanding of how some things work in a cancer cell."
He said the long pipeline between discovery and successful introduction into the clinic and the fact that the pipeline has been continuously filled through basic research discoveries that have been hypothesis-driven, often require decades before actual clinical application.
As an example he cited his laboratory's discovery of the protein in 1981 noting that it took another 15 years before becoming clinically approved through drug development by Genentech (as ).
"However, there is almost a blindness among patient advocates that we need some utilitarian applicability of research so the fate of patients can be substantively improved," he said.
He added that there has been a "hue and cry" for translational research at the same time there is an almost "equally mindless drive" to encourage scientists to collaborate with one another and form collaborative teams to communicate more.
"If only we talked to one another, the story goes, things would go much faster, and both of these have their element of mindlessness."
"No one needs to incentivize this collaboration because such collaborations are essential for survival," he said, noting that some research requires other talents, balance, and techniques afforded by other laboratories and that researchers will instantaneously move to collaborate with them.
He said that there has been an ethic that has grown over the last 20 years that collaboration has been the key to accelerating scientific advances, both in the clinic where collaboration is highly useful because it can benefit patients, as well as at the level of basic research.
"And the reason that this is mindless is because it is using money to incentivize something that would have occurred anyhow."
He said that collaboration funds are given by federal and nonfederal sources to form large collaborative teams and that although there may be synergy early in the lifetime of the funding cycle, research groups that are "worth their salt" will move in other directions, and "the initially perceived synergies will melt away while the funding dedicated to incentivize the collaboration will persist for years thereafter."
Weinberg said that collaboration will happen naturally because it is how basic research works.
"If someone is basically functional, he or she will look for collaborations not for the sake of collaborations, but for the sake of yielding some synergies between his or her own research programs and that of others."
Regarding 's creation and funding of "dream teams," he said that in some cases the sum has been much more than the individual parts and in other cases there was no real benefit in funding "all these different groups together."
He said that there has to be an increasing awareness on the government and nongovernment levels that basic research is being bled white.
Noting that the bench slots at his own lab had decreased in recent years, Weinberg said that it's important to face the demographic reality of who is going into careers of basic cancer discovery and that it is not always the best and the brightest.
"I refuse to say that I am going to conduct translational research because it is something that my lab is not good at and I don't want to reorient my lab's research agenda to pander to the requirements of the funding agencies," he said.