Peter Jones, Ph.D., director of the University of Southern California Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center, will co-lead one of five prestigious “Dream Teams” announced on Wednesday, May 27, by Stand Up 2 Cancer, an initiative dedicated to funding cutting-edge research designed to bring new cancer treatment to patients in an accelerated timeframe.

Jones and team leader Stephen Baylin, M.D., Deputy Director of the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center, Johns Hopkins University, have been awarded one of five three-year grants worth a total of $73.6 million.

“We believe this collaborative process will help us develop more targeted therapies, and that it will result in a substantial benefit to patients,” says Jones, director of the Urological Research Laboratories and distinguished professor of biochemistry and molecular biology and urology at the Keck School of Medicine of USC.

The Jones and Baylin Dream Team project is titled “Bringing Epigenetic Therapy to the Forefront of Cancer Management,” and will focus on epigenetic therapy, a highly promising area of cancer research. The total grant award for the project is $9 million, with $2.2 million coming to USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center.

The team will hone in on the process called DNA de-methylation, which effectively “silences” or de-activates cancer stem cells. This will be followed by a clinical trial to see how well new drug therapy works to thwart the epigenetic changes that cause cancer.

“We are interested in the way that genes become switched on and off, and how this leads to cancer,” says Dr. Jones. “We can use drugs to switch the genes back on again. But we need to understand what went wrong first before we can fix it.”

Watch the "Dream Team" talk about the Stand Up 2 Cancer Initiative here.

Jones was recently awarded the 2009 Prize for Basic Cancer Research from the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) and the Kirk A. and Dorothy P. Landon Foundation.

Jones joined the University of Southern California in 1977, where he attained the rank of professor in 1985 and became director of the cancer center in 1993.

A past president of the American Association of Cancer Researchers and deputy editor of Cancer Research, Jones is the author of more than 250 journal publications and book chapters and serves on several national and international committees, panels and editorial boards.

He has received a variety of honors, including the University of Southern California Associates Award for Creativity in Research and Scholarship and the Outstanding Investigator Grant from the National Cancer Institute. Recently, Jones, along with his colleague Stephen B. Baylin, M.D, deputy director of The Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins, received the Kirk A. Landon-AACR Prize for Basic and Translational Cancer Research.

For more information on the Stand Up 2 Cancer Initiative, visit the Stand Up 2 Cancer Web site.

See also, the American Association of Cancer Researchers site at: http://www.aacr.org/