08/21/2026
Turning Discovery into Impact
Dr. Anindya Bagchi, PhD (Sanford Burnham Prebys) and Lukas Chavez, PhD (UC San Diego) have spent years asking this question: why do certain aggressive cancers, including cancers of the blood, brain, colon, and o***y, behave so much worse than others with similar profiles?
For decades, scientists have known that a specific region of the genome, sitting right next to a very dangerous cancer gene, was frequently damaged. In 2022, Curebound awarded a Discovery Grant that enabled Drs. Bagchi and Chavez to explore and what they found was a forty-year mystery hiding in plain sight.
With your support, they discovered that this damaged region does two things: 1) one end turns on a newly discovered protein, “Firefox”, that forces cancer cells to produce more of the protein that drives their growth and 2) the other end deletes a second protein, "Honeybadger", that normally keeps a separate cancer pathway under control. One event steps on the accelerator and cuts the brakes simultaneously. This explains, for the first time, why these cancers are so hard to stop.
Two companion papers describing these discoveries have been accepted for back-to-back publication in the prestigious Genes & Development Journal, a recognition that this is not incremental progress, but a shift in understanding. The Curebound-funded Firefox work is the foundation paper, the Honeybadger paper is the direct downstream discovery it enabled.
Dr. Bagchi's team is already designing therapies based on what they found. Clinical trials are the next step. None of this was possible without you.
Firefox: https://genesdev.cshlp.org/content/early/2026/08/10/gad.353355.125
Honeybadger: https://genesdev.cshlp.org/content/early/2026/08/11/gad.353356.125
Read more about Curebound funded projects at curebound.org
