Dr. Jonathan Brody

“It’s an amazing, intellectual puzzle that I want to solve”.

The puzzle Dr. Brody refers to is Pancreatic Cancer, which he and his team at Jefferson Hospital have recently been acknowledged for in their efforts to put more pieces on the table.

The American Cancer Society and the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network have just awarded Dr. Brody with considerable funding primarily for his “HuR” work.

Dr. Brody’s journey into the world of Pancreatic Cancer began in music. A percussionist in his youth, Jonathan went to college on a music scholarship. As these years went by, he realized that a career in music was few and far between, and decided to shift gears. He chose to go to graduate school for a PhD, and actually skip medical school.

“It felt unacceptable to me to tell patients that they have five months to live, and that’s it”. By going into the research department, he felt he could do more by figuring out ways to cure the disease, as opposed to treating the patients after the fact.

After his schooling was completed, he was recruited by Dr. Yeo at Jefferson in Philadelphia to join his team.

His current work can be explained most easily the way he explains it himself, in an analogy to a car.

Dr. Brody compares a Pancreatic Cancer cell to a driver in a car for his HuR work. Basically, a Pancreatic Cancer cell utilizes an HuR pathway to survive, much like a driver would use an airbag to survive in an accident.

(In our analysis, the driver is bad, and we want him to be killed in the accident. Remember, the driver is a bad pancreatic cancer cell, so don’t feel bad!)

This work is finding a way to eliminate the HuR in patients depending on their particular status and thus give the cancer cells less of a chance to survive.

This work is only being researched at Jefferson Hospital, but these doctors have a community of researchers at MIT, Johns Hopkins, Georgetown and more.

Dr. Brody prefers to take his work from “bench to bedside” regarding trials. This skips the animal testing phase when possible, and starts helping patients right out of the lab almost.

Dr. Brody points our that there are a number of variables as to why Pancreatic Cancer progress may seem slower than other research and cure potential:

1) Of course, funding. Despite this disease affecting over 80,000 people a year, it only received 2% of the funds allotted for cancer research.

2) Early detection strategies are not prominent. There isn’t a tell tale test that can diagnose at stage one, or earlier.

3) The turnover for survivors isn’t set in stone; meaning, we don’t always know they’re out there, and the public doesn’t know that they can survive.

Deep down, Dr. Brody is a do-gooder. For a second, he playfully explained his role in the pancreatic cancer world as him being “an investigator trying to solve a murder”.

Since coming to Jefferson, he has started to participate in some Pan Can events, and even gotten to know some of the survivors…a bit out of the ordinary for the lab team.

So who knows, if Mike Schmidt can end up in the Baseball Hall of Fame after going to college for basketball, then maybe a musician can cure cancer.