Jori Zemel Scholar and Fellowship

"It is a great honor to be selected as a Jori Zemel Scholar and Fellowship recipient. The Jori Zemel Children's Bone Cancer Foundation has provided critical funding to our most talented and motivated osteosarcoma researchers, helping us to make novel discoveries in the laboratory and new therapies to fight osteosarcoma for our young patients. I am inspired by Jori's fight against osteosarcoma and by Jori's family's strength and passion to help researchers continue the fight.

I greatly appreciate the support from the Jori Zemel Children's Bone Cancer Foundation for my research. With this critical support we, scientists and physicians, will fight this disease until every child will survive."
-Dr. Pingyu Zhang

In 2005, the Jori Zemel Children's Bone Cancer Foundation helped establish the first and only fellowship in the world dedicated solely to osteosarcoma research, the Jori Zemel Scholar and Fellowship Award. Under the direction of Dr. Dennis Hughes, M.D., Ph.D., researchers at The Children's Cancer Hospital at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have made major strides in the fight against children's bone cancer. One day we will find a cure!

Past Fellowship Recipients:

Dr. Laura Nelson

Before joining Dr. Hughes' lab at the Children's Cancer Hospital at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in December 2005, Dr. Nelson received a B.S. in Biochemistry at Texas A&M University in 1991 and a Ph.D. in Biochemistry at the University of Texas-Houston Health Science Center’s Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences in 2002.

During her fellowship, Dr. Nelson studied how genes and proteins work to cause osteosarcoma. Specifically, many patients with bone cancer end up with tumors spreading to the lungs, which is often the reason why patients don’t survive even after surgery and chemotherapy. Dr. Nelson was interested in studying specific proteins and how they affect the spread of bone cancer to the lungs, in order to target those proteins and reduce the spread of cancer. Hopefully, this research will help develop new drugs that will improve survival rates and the quality of life for patients with bone cancer.

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Dr. Pingyu Zhang

Dr. Zhang obtained a B.S. in Biology in 1994 and a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology and Genetics from Nankai University in China.

After joining Dr. Hughes' lab in 2005, Dr. Zhang spent two years studying the cell signaling pathway involved in osteosarcoma cell invasiveness and metastasis. His work demonstrated that molecular and genetic inhibition of this signaling pathway can dramatically suppress the pulmonary metastasis of osteosarcoma. Dr. Zhang's findings also suggest that this signaling pathway may serve as a prognostic marker to predict the possibility of the spread of osteosarcoma to the lungs. This will help doctors detect and treat patients early to prevent lung metastases.

Jori Zemel Children's Bone Cancer Foundation

One day we will find a cure!