Kate Rittenhouse-Olson
BUFFALO, N.Y. — A University at Buffalo cancer researcher has received a $300,000 grant from King Saud University to continue her work with a Saudi researcher on a vaccine for breast cancer, the schools announced Jan. 21.
Kate Rittenhouse-Olson, professor of biotechnical and clinical laboratory sciences in UB’s School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, is collaborating with Adel Almogren, a professor in KSU’s Department of Pathology and Immunology, who worked with Rittenhouse when he was a graduate student at UB.
That work resulted in research on development of a novel vaccine immunotherapy approach that may block cancer metastasis. The work was described in a paper published in the August 2009 issue of Neoplasia, on which Almogren was a principal author and Rittenhouse was senior author.
The Saudi grant will advance this work, with the goal of perfecting the vaccine in an animal model for ultimate use in humans. Almogren and Rittenhouse-Olson will continue to collaborate and will travel between the United States and Saudi Arabia throughout the investigation, which may garner additional support from the Saudis as the work progresses.
“This is a very promising vaccine target,” Rittenhouse-Olson said, “because if we are successful, it could be important to breast, colon, bladder and prostate cancer patients.”
Almogren said, “Collaborative research between KSU and UB could open a wide channel of scientific interaction that may not be limited to this special project.”
After the Neoplasia paper was published, Rittenhouse-Olson, her husband James Olson, a UB professor of pharmacology and toxicology and social and preventive medicine, and their colleagues Susan Morey and Jamie Heimburg-Molinaro, were invited to visit Riyadh and to meet King Abdullah ibn Abdulaziz Al Saud.
Rittenhouse-Olson said that it was an exceptional honor for four American scientists to meet with the king. “He is very interested in cancer research and education,” she noted.
The University at Buffalo, a research-intensive public university, is the flagship institution in the State University of New York system.