Interview with Dr. Carla Grandori

My entrepreneurial venture: a long and winding road

By Graciela Matrajt

Carla Grandori grew up in Italy and was attracted to science from a very young age. Inspired by her grandmother, who was herself a scientist, Dr. Grandori started studying physics but wasn't entirely convinced that this was what she wanted to pursue for her future career. When she was 19, in the midst of her existential doubts about her career, her grandmother was diagnosed with stomach cancer and soon after passed away. During the last days of the grandmother's life, both grandmother and granddaughter conversed about science and Dr. Grandori’s future career. Her grandmother's vision was clear: molecular biology was the future for medical research. This event and the conversations with her grandmother profoundly marked Dr. Grandori’s choice, who decided to drop physics and switch to medical school with the idea of becoming an oncologist. 

When Dr. Grandori was finalizing her medical studies, she realized that the available cancer treatment was highly toxic, often unaffordable, and strongly affecting the patient's quality of life. With the choice of either doing a specialty or starting research to find new treatment choices, Dr. Grandori decided on the latter. At that time cancer genes (oncogenes) were just being discovered and targeting those genes was a major goal. “Every cancer cell contains a crucial set of genes that we can think of as locks—they lock and unlock the cancer’s ability to kill. I wanted to identify those locks and make chemical keys to fit them. This could destroy cancer cells with extraordinary precision, leaving the rest of the body unharmed. This would be better than chemotherapy, whose toxicity ultimately killed my grandmother” says Dr. Grandori.

As a medical student, Dr. Grandori came to the US as an intern and worked as a volunteer in research laboratories. She tasted the way research was being done in America and at the end of her medical school years, Dr. Grandori started looking for post-doctoral research opportunities in the US and found one at the National Cancer Institute. After one year, she felt she needed to go to grad school to be able to learn, more hands-on, the secrets of doing research. She remembered her grandmother's words as she joined the Molecular Biology and Biochemistry Graduate Program at Rockefeller University, after which she continued as a post-doctoral fellow at MIT.

Aside from her professional life, Dr. Grandori’s private life was also developing in a positive direction. She got married, and her husband decided to move to Seattle. With the intent to follow him, she shortened her postdoc contract and departed to Seattle leaving behind experiments, data, and results, which would never be published. Unfortunately, this move strongly affected her career. But the perseverance and curiosity of Dr. Grandori took her through new, undiscovered roads. Once in Seattle, Dr. Grandori found another postdoc opportunity at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (FHCRC), where she stayed for 12 years doing very basic research on oncogenes. As her career continued to grow, so did her private life. Dr. Grandori had two kids and, to keep her work-life balance, which for a working parent is always a challenge, she chose to stay in the same lab doing basic science rather than adventuring to start her own clinical research lab and become a Principal Investigator.

But life is obstinate sometimes. With the goal to be closer to the clinical applications, she decided to move from basic sciences to another lab within the FHCRC. Dr. Grandori then had a chance to feel more valuable as she started mentoring women graduate students and learned new valuable research techniques such as culturing cells directly from human tissues. Her career was getting a new lift when she got divorced. With two kids in charge, the small salary of a scientist forced her to look for another job, so Dr. Grandori turned her sight toward industry. Despite having obtained a very prestigious NIH award (RO1), Dr. Grandori departed the FHCRC to join the company Rosetta, which was part of the oncology franchise of Merck, leaving behind her renowned RO1 award and her newly acquired responsibilities. Despite these sacrifices, Dr. Grandori thinks that moving to industry and particularly to Rosetta was the best move she has ever made. Not only she started earning a salary reflecting her caliber, but she was also valued more than ever and obtained simple but important things such as her own office, and amazing resources and tools to establish her research and herself as a prominent scientist. It was a dream job, but like any dream, this one also came to an end, when Rosetta announced their closure, and a year later, Dr. Grandori was laid off.

Dr. Grandori had then the choice between either remaining in industry and moving to the East Coast where Merck was offering her to continue her job, or remaining in Seattle and going back to academia where she was guaranteed the freedom to pursue the discovery of novel drug targets for cancer. While at Rosetta, Dr. Grandori learned to use a new technology referred to as High Throughput Screening. This technology, based on robotic equipment, enables the testing of hundreds of genes; it can also be employed to test thousands of drugs.  “I soon realized that I could adapt this screening technology to pinpoint in patient cancer samples, genes or drugs that could be used to treat cancer in a personalized way,” Dr. Grandori says. 

Because Rosetta had been recognized as pioneering this approach and Dr. Grandori had experience with it, she was offered by the University of Washington a position to open and develop a facility that would offer this technology to the broad Seattle academic community. This is how Dr. Grandori became the director of the UW High Throughput Screening Facility. She established the facility and reached out to researchers and former colleagues both in academia and industry to make use of it. The success of the establishment and the entrepreneurial actions of Dr. Grandori permitted the opening of a new state-of-the-art facility at the UW in 2009, and rewarded her with a UW entrepreneurial award in 2011.

As Dr. Grandori and colleagues gained encouraging data showing the feasibility of this new approach, both her professional and private lives were paving new roads. Dr. Grandori decided to return to the FHCRCto open her own lab and where she could focus all her time on pioneering the application of this new approach. She became the Principal Investigator of her research and she met a new partner for both her scientific projects and life.

Driven by her primary inspiration, back when she was 19, of finding new and less toxic ways to cure cancer, and by her persistent will to make finding the cure for cancer accessible to all, she started a foundation that would pay for the screenings: Cure First. “Unfortunately, few today can take advantage of this technology. It is expensive and the expertise to use it is rare. Cure First wishes, through people's gifts and generosity, to finance the technology and provide the necessary resources to develop potentially less-toxic and personalized cancer therapies” Dr. Grandori says. 

Cure First will support this approach and help take the first steps toward what is known as personalized medicine. 

Big efforts come with satisfying rewards. In 2013, Dr. Carla Grandori, along with her colleague and partner Dr. Christopher Kemp also at the FHCRC, were awarded for their novel screening approach a prestigious grant as part of the Cancer Target Discovery and Development program of the National Cancer Institute. 

It was a long and winding road that ended at the doors of Cure First, an organization that will support cancer screening and precision treatment for all. 

Grazie and bravissimo Carla!

Dr. Carla Grandori is a physician by training and a PhD scientist currently working at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. She is an experimentalist who enjoys working at the bench and who likes pioneering new techniques. She has also recently founded a non-profit organization, Cure First, aiming to raise funds to develop new technologies for screening genes related to cancer, to make these technologies available to any scientist, healthcare provider, and patients, and to identify less toxic and more effective cancer treatments than chemotherapy. More about Cure First can be found at www.curefirst.org and at the Facebook page of Cure First.