The 9th International Forum on Stem Cells (IFSC) in 2024 focuses on basic stem cell research, regenerative medicine, cell therapy, and the application of clinical research guidelines, gathering experts and scholars from around the world to discuss the latest frontiers in scientific discoveries and technological advancements. During the conference, "Hematology Frontier" specially invited Dr. Daniel G.Tenen, Director of the Cancer Science Institute of Singapore, to share the potential and future trends in the field of cancer treatment.

Hematology Frontier：As an oncofetal protein, SALL4 plays a crucial role in various cancers. How did you initially become interested in SALL4 and decide to make it your research focus? What unique mechanisms do you believe SALL4 has in the initiation and progression of cancer?

Dr. Daniel G.Tenen：I have to laugh a little bit about how I became interested in it, because i’ve had a laboratory at Harvard for 40 years, and i’ve always been interested how genes are regulated, both in normal cells versus cancer cells.And so, when Li Chai moved from Yale to Harvard and started her own lab at Harvard, I got to know about her work on SALL4.

And so she’s worked on SALL4 almost her whole career. And to me, SALL4 is a wonderful example of how genes are regulated in normal versus cancer, because it’s on when you’re an embryo. And it goes off when you’re an adult. And then the fact that it comes on again, in people who have cancer is very important. For me, it fits in with my overall interest in gene regulation, both normal and cancer.

So that’s how I got interested in SALL4. Because it’s a very good example of how this regulation of genes can lead to cancer, as opposed to many genes that people study in cancer. It’s generally not mutated very much. The real reason it does bad things because it’s been expressed in the wrong cells at the wrong time. And to me, that’s always been my interest in science. So it fits. And then I had a good collaborator who was a real expert in everything about SALL4. She studied it for 20 years.

Hematology Frontier：How do you view the research progress in the field of cancer treatment? And how can we encourage more individuals with drug development capabilities to engage in the research and development of innovative drugs?

Dr. Daniel G.Tenen：So I don’t think we’ve made as much progress as we should, and I blame the drug companies. Are there to make money? They don’t really care if they cure anybody. If they cure everybody, they don’t make any money. I’m being a little facetious there, but they like to pick easy targets. This is not quite so easy. It’s not on the surface of the cell. It’s inside the nucleus. But there are ways of doing that. Or I during my talk, I talked about this, it may be so upset, because a lot of the drug companies, when we talk to them about some of the potential therapies we’ve developed in the lab, said we want an oral drug, we don’t want an injectable.

Guess what most chemotherapy today is still injectable, and guess what all these diabetics. They’re very happy to inject themselves. If they have diabetes, people will take a good drug if it’s injectable. They don’t want to take an injective of it’s a bad drug, right? So I blame the drug companies. There’s no reason. Now I’m an academic lab. I’m not good at making drugs. I’m good at doing science. I would like to work with more companies to do that. But they wanna pick easy targets where they can make a lot of money. But I always laugh because we have a peptide therapy that actually looks pretty good in the mouse studies. When we talk to the drug companies, we don’t want to work on a peptide, it’s expensive. We don’t want to make it injectable.

I talked about this. People developed these GLP-1 receptor agonists. For people with diabetes. It’s an injectable, it’s a peptide, and it’s made trillions of dollars, because every fat American wants to lose weight the easy way by. Yeah, so there’s a good example. They’ve made trillions apparently already. Then the diabetics can’t even get their hands on the drug. So I blame the drug companies. I’m sorry. We’re not a drug company, we’re an academic institution. They should pick up the ball and run with it. They steal ideas from us if it’s easy making money.the Challenge is that get people who know how to make drugs to pick it up and the run with the ball.

Hematology Frontier：Looking ahead, what trends or directions do you think are worth noting in the research of SALL4 as a cancer treatment target? What key scientific questions need to be addressed in the process of achieving SALL4-targeted therapy?

Dr. Daniel G.Tenen：it’s kind of funny. I am actually a licensed medical oncologist still. I don’t know if you heard me say this. It’s been 40 years since i’ve seen my last patient. I think the potential for this is tremendous. It’s a gene that’s not on in most normal adult cells. The therapeutic index, meaning the difference between normal and cancer is infinite if you have a very specific drug.Again, as I said, this isn’t my talent developing good molecules that have the right kind of properties to give to people. The drug companies have that. Let him take the ball and run with it right here. I’m gonna hand it to him like a football game, American football game. I’m the quarterback. Here’s the ball run with it. But I think it’s got tremendous potential. And believe me, if I had a deadly cancer, it’s gonna kill me. I’ll let someone inject something into my vein.