The Ruzic Research Foundation Inc

The Ruzic Research Foundation Inc. is a nonprofit corporation established by Neil Ruzic to catalyze and help fund research in the fields of cancer and other sciences. At present, we are concentrating primarily on specific research projects that have the potential to cure, render indolent, or otherwise extend the lives of lymphoma victims.

The virtues of interdisciplinary innovation have been celebrated, but rarely put into practice on a meaningful scale. Yes, you find immunologists working with pathologists, or marine biologists interacting with environmentalists. But it is rare for a physicist, for instance, to join up with a genomic scientist and have much to say about cell development. Investigators in different scientific disciplines normally do not communicate with each other.

How can a physical scientist aid cancer research? For one thing, at the molecular level, all action in an organism may be seen as mechanical action, and physical principles prevail even in biochemical systems. For another, various scientific “fields” like biology, physics, or anthropology are not discrete entities but only labels of organizational convenience. Beyond that, diverse ways of thinking about a problem beget diverse theories about how something as tremendously complex as the human body works.

For instance, workers in molecular biology, paleontology, comparative anatomy, and anthropology all had different views about evolution until they began to talk to each other in the mid-20^th Century. Before that, for a hundred years, evolutionary theory hadn’t advanced much beyond Darwin.

Neil Ruzic, first as the founder of Industrial Research (now R&D), Oceanology, and Electro-Technology, then as a lunar scientist (who received the first U.S. patent for a device to be used solely on the moon), and later as the originator of the Island for Science, has spent all of his adult life in finding solutions to problems outside the research discipline in question.

On the Island for Science on Little Stirrup Cay, Bahamas, interdisciplinary innovation was practiced in the fields of wave and wind energy, desalination, drugs from the sea, and farming shrimp in symbiosis with carrageenan seaweed. By bringing the viewpoints of various scientists to bear on complex problems, solutions often arise in ways that might not occur to a team made up of the same number of scientists of like backgrounds. Interdisciplinary innovation is desirable because the more areas of pertinent experience accessible to conscious and preconscious thought the better are the prospects for creativity. Nowhere is this approach more necessary, nor the stakes higher, than in cancer research.

Cancer research may be broken down into three categories for purposes of comparison and funding:

Type 1: Basic untargeted long-term research at universities to fund postdoctoral fellowships. Supporting young scientists who have just received their PhDs or MDs, is where virtually all funds allocated for research are directed by the lymphoma foundations. Career-development grants are worthwhile in the long term, but are the least-effective way to cure cancer in the relative short term (except for the fact that project leaders have some freedom to shift some postdoc time to their own projects.) Career-development grants comprise the least-needed area additional funding because it is what the National Cancer Institute does on a massive scale.

Type 2: Targeted basic research conducted by senior university researchers and focused on a shorter time horizon, such as two to four years. It is here that the Ruzic Research Foundation concentrates exclusively, trying where possible to encourage and catalyze new approaches to old problems in genomics, angiogenesis, vaccines, and others. These are specific projects, directed toward making incremental discoveries that can lead to new therapies. In the case of lymphoma research it has potential to work toward, if not a cure, then in keeping victims in remission for the rest of their lives.

The foundation grew out of the investigations of the cancer research of others that Neil Ruzic did in rendering his own mantle-cell lymphoma (MCL) indolent. After examining the results of a hundred chemotherapy protocols for MCL patients, he concluded that chemo is ineffective against MCL and may even do more harm than good. Reasoning that today’s chemotherapies had emerged from the laboratory 50 years ago, he began visiting the nation’s cancer laboratories seeking new therapies that will be in use tomorrow.

One therapeutic technique that came to light was the surgical procedure of splenectomy. Halting the progress of lymphoma by excision of the spleen has been noted since 1980 in murine experiments at Stanford University. Recent statistical studies at the Mayo Clinic show splenectomy to be efficacious in more than half of human MCL victims, although the physiology still is not well-understood. Ruzic’s splenectomy, performed by Dr. Rade Pejic in 1998, worked to shrink his previously large lymph nodes and returned his blood counts to normal.

Ruzic suggested the startup of a genomic project at UCLA designed to discover which genes trigger various kinds of lymphoma from their first indolent stages into aggressive diseases that kill the patient. A remarkably creative UCLA team, headed by Jonathan Braun, MD/PhD, has isolated more than 400 “aggression” genes and now is seeking the signaling or controlling pathways from these genes to the molecular machines called proteins. Once this work is completed, one or more pharmaceutical companies will be invited to utilize the data in synthesizing compounds that will render lymphomas permanently indolent. Such drugs could have application in leukemia and organ cancers as well. Ruzic helped fund and raised funds from others for this project each year starting in 1999.

In 1998 and 1999 Ruzic also helped fund a study at the University of Pennsylvania and a related T-cell project at Xcyte Therapies. T cells are the body’s most potent fighters against foreign invaders, but cancer antigens do not normally recognize the T cells that can kill them. The project seeks to refine a method developed by Carl June, MD, and his colleagues then at the Naval Research Laboratory (now at UPenn) for activating two simultaneous signals delivered by artificial antigen-presenting cells. The goal is for doctors to be able to send a quantity of a cancer patient’s blood from anywhere in the world to a specialized laboratory. There the T cells in the blood would be co-stimulated. The processed blood then would be sent back to the hospital for reinfusion in the patient.

When one project achieves adequate funding from elsewhere, the foundation intends to move on to other promising projects. For instance, after Ruzic’s donation to the T-cell project, the Bill Gates Foundation gave UPenn $4,500,000. At that point, Ruzic turned his attention to the lymphoma-indolence project, to the inquiry into the efficacy of splenectomy, and to various angiogenesis inhibitors.

Numerous studies on some 50 antiangiogenesis agents are underway that use chemotherapeutic and other compounds in low but frequent doses—not to poison cancer tumors directly, but instead to target the vasculature. The idea, pioneered for 30 years by Dr. Judah Folkman at Harvard, is simple: stop the tumors from sending out capillaries to the blood supply and they die from lack of nutrients. Searle/Pharmacia research pharmacologists and others have conduced numerous clinical trials using daily doses of celocoxhib (Celebrex) as a relatively benign inhibitor of angiogenesis, often in synergistic effect with frequent low-dose vinblastine or other chemicals.

Someday, perhaps in our lifetimes, proteins will be made from scratch, designed for useful properties. Before that, however, projects like the UCLA “Project Indolence” described above have potential for rendering lymphomas in permanent remission. We want to assist other practical targeted research projects as well.

As a small foundation with limited resources, we follow this step-by-step approach:

1) Examine as many type-2 projects as possible, by reading scientific papers and proposals and then by visiting the research laboratories involved.

2) Provide seed money if it can’t be supplied by larger foundations or agencies.

3) Attempt to catalyze the pace of the research effort by putting the team in touch with others in diverse fields whose discoveries or approaches may be useful.

We do not maintain a paid staff and do not spend money raising funds. We encourage others to send their funds directly to the university projects we recommend. However, as a 501(c)(3) tax-deductible foundation, we will accept contributions, the full amount of which will be sent to the most timely university project as soon as it is identified as fitting the criteria above. Such funds will be sent immediately, or if we are “between projects,” they will be sent within three months and will include interest earned. Mostly we use our own funds derived from gifts by Neil Ruzic or from his company, Little Stirrup Cay Ltd.

Because we do not work to raise funds we are not in competition with other foundations, but seek to cooperate with them in identifying and co-funding specific projects.

Neil Ruzic (BS degrees in three fields, former scientific magazine publisher and author of 10 books on science), president and a director, actively investigates promising projects such as those above.

Carol Ruzic, MA, (Neil Ruzic’s wife), secretary-treasurer and a director, is active in information retrieval in the areas discussed.

David Ruzic, PhD (Neil and Carol’s son), vice president and a director, is professor of nuclear plasma, and radiological engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana. He brings a wide knowledge of energy, materials, and other sciences and engineering to all projects under discussion.

Registered agent and attorney: Paul Horowitz, esq. Horowitz & Weinstein, 311 W. Superior St., Suite 525, Chicago, IL 60610, (312) 787-5533

Leslie Pejic, PhD, neural scientist, advises in the fields of molecular biology who works in Michigan, IN. Her husband, Rade Pejic, MD, a vascular surgeon with vast experience including battlefield surgery, contributes ideas from his knowledge of splenectomy and many other procedures.

Michael J. Blend, PhD/DO, director and professor of nuclear medicine at the U of Illinois, Chicago, IL, advises on radiolabeled monoclonal antibodies and other therapies.

Jeffrey Medeiros, MD, chief of pathology, M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX.

Jonathan Braun, MD/PhD, who is a molecular biologist, immunologist, and pathologist.

Dr. Braun with post-doctoral researchers

Jonathan Said, MD, world-renowned research pathologist.
Phillip Koeffler, MD, professor of medicine at UCLA and chief of hematology at Cedars Sinai Hospital, advise on a variety of medical and cancer projects.

Wolf-Karsten Hofmann, MD, Dept. of Hematology, University Hospital, Frankfurt/Main, Germany.

Shahid Siddiqi, MS, aeronautical engineer and consultant to NASA for improved airplane transportation, helps investigate new research in cancer as well as in science and engineering.

Testimony of Neil Ruzic as a director of the Lymphoma Research Foundation, before the House Committee on Appropriations: Subcommittee on Labor, Health & Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies,
Tuesday, March 14, 2000

Excellent websites designed to inform sufferers and their families about this disease and its treatment are: