Building on basics

Combinatorial Locksmith
(continued)

"The Arizona Cancer Center is well-established," said Lam, who achieved great success in the research arena while there. "But I was ready for the opportunity to return to California and contribute to the building of this program. There is strong support for the cancer program here. It's obvious this is an up-and-coming program, and I believe I can make a contribution here."

He's not alone.

"The synergy between his work and that of other researchers here, such as Hsing-Jien Kung, who works on signal transduction, and David Gandara, who works on developmental therapeutics, has great potential," said deVere White, who is heading the cancer center's full-court press to achieve National Cancer Institute designation.

"His work dovetails beautifully with theirs so the sum of the parts is greater than any of the parts individually."

Already Lam has struck up working relationships with UC Davis radioimmunotherapy researchers Robert O'Donnell, Gerald and Sally DeNardo and chemist Claude Meares to use the process of combinatorial chemistry to develop peptides that target lymphoma and ovarian cancer cells.

This container holds one combinatorial library containing approximately four million peptide compounds.