Periodically, the Office of Philanthropy invites City of Hope® leaders, faculty and researchers for a conversation to learn more about them and their groundbreaking work.
We spoke with Debbie Thurmond, Ph.D., the director of the Arthur Riggs Diabetes & Metabolism Research Institute and Chan Soon-Shiong Shapiro Distinguished Chair in Diabetes. She is leading City of Hope’s work to identify cellular and molecular mechanisms in diabetes so that new therapies can stop or reverse those processes.
Who inspired you to become a researcher, particularly in diabetes?
I always loved science. My grandfather was a chemist and had his own company making detergents and soaps: Thurmond Chemicals. But I also had a strong musical leaning. I have a minor in music and tried for a few years to be a professional classical violinist. Music and science have a lot of analytics to them. I ventured beyond classical music into jazz and more free form genres, and I’ve done the same with my science. There’s been a connectedness there that has created in my scientific practice an inventiveness.
What brought you to City of Hope almost nine years ago?
City of Hope is a true home for inventors. I am an inventor. I had invented a fair amount when I was at Indiana University, but my inventions were falling into ‘the valley of death’ — that span of time and experimentation that is incredibly expensive; the National Institutes of Health (NIH) does not fund that part of the pathway for drug development. We ran into so many roadblocks: state policies, university policies. A state institution like [Indiana] simply doesn’t have the finances, the resources, the core facilities and capabilities. So when I had the opportunity to discuss this in depth with Art Riggs, it seemed like it was destiny for me to come here.
Philanthropy does help these new discoveries walk up to the NIH. Tell us more about how City of Hope’s environment promotes invention.
It’s a culture where out-of-the-box thinking is cultivated. That thinking is what leads to programs like CAR T — real game-changer technologies. You have an idea at an institution that says: ‘Wow! That’s amazing, is anybody else doing that?’ And you say: ‘No, it’s in my brain, but I don’t have any finances to put it into practice, and the NIH is going to laugh when they hear this idea because there’s no data.’ At City of Hope, we have access to pilot grant funding through a variety of programs. It’s amazing what even $50,000 can do. It can get liftoff for an idea.
Can you tell us about the connection between cancer and diabetes?
A number of our lifesaving cancer treatments can actually induce diabetes or induce severe risk for diabetes. Right now, we don’t have a prediction for which patients might have that reaction. We are working with the cancer doctors to come up with diagnostics that might be able to better predict this. Because we have this hyperfocus on cancer and diabetes at City of Hope, I think that this will be the place that finds faster ways to mitigate these challenges.
I can give you another real-world example of this connection. My lab has been working for two years on a new drug that has the capability of acting on two different cell types that underpin Type 2 diabetes and reversing it. We published recently in Nature Communications. What I have learned through reading and through working with others on campus is that with triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), which is devastating, especially for young women of color — it’s possible—POSSIBLE — that our new drug might be able to mitigate TNBC. We had a planning meeting yesterday. The drug is actually being moved from my lab to that other lab today so it can be applied. We’re doing the experiment and we’re moving fast.
As director of the Arthur Riggs Diabetes & Metabolism Research Institute, where do you see the research moving in the next five years?
One of the game-changers was the Wanek Family Project for Type 1 Diabetes and the way it fostered out-of-the-box thinking. We put money behind projects that were well-rationalized, but no one had thought to do before. We have developed technology and platforms. We do have a number of clinical trials going on right now as part of that project.
The larger part of the research going on at City of Hope in the Riggs Institute is in the Type 2 diabetes space. We have everything from treatment to diagnostics to a focus on liver disease (high blood sugar over long periods can cause liver damage). We have an amazing group of individuals working on strategies that can mitigate the progression of liver disease to cancer and ideally reverse. That’s one of our other focus areas in the Type 2 space.
We don’t play it safe. We’re aiming for cures. When I got here and saw what we had and that cures could be realized, it really captured my heart. I started changing my science, being a greater risk taker with my inventions. Don’t hold back! If you don’t know which kind of platform is the best thing, make them all. Go to every different core facility and test and reach out to people and vet this. The important thing is: fail fast, succeed fast. If you fail fast, learn and move on.