Bryan J. Clapper

1502 2nd Ave SW, Austin, MN 55912 • bryan@bjclapper.com

Institute has sights set on cancer

Originally published in the Austin Daily Herald, Feb. 25, 2007

Research being done at the Hormel Institute in Austin may hold the key to eliminating future generations’ greatest threat.

The institute is quickly becoming one of the world’s leading cancer research facilities, and a $20 million expansion project may propel it to first place in the field.

“Cancer ... has already surpassed heart disease as the No. 1 killer since 2005 ... and is the biggest public health threat to this country,” Dr. Zigang Dong, the executive director of the institute, said. “The goal is to have a cancer-free world in the next few generations.”

The Hormel Institute was founded in 1942 by Jay C. Hormel in an agreement with the Hormel Foundation and Regents of the University of Minnesota’s graduate school, with an initial focus on lipid research. Throughout the years, its focus has shifted several times, but is now dead-set on finding a cure for cancer.

“If the institute, together with many other cancer researchers all over the world can win the war against cancer, then it will really benefit the next generations,” Dong said. “Probably in the future, ‘win the war against cancer’ is no longer a slogan; it’s coming. It’s become true.”

The Hormel Institute was one of the first in the world to “report the discovery of key molecular targets and mechanisms in tumor promotion,” according to the facility’s 2005-06 annual report. In that year, the institute was published 42 times in major research journals, such as NATURE and Molecular Cell.

Since 2002, the institute has also tripled its funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and in the last year, received more than $6.8 million in major grants and contracts from NIH, the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, the Hormel Foundation and others. In the last five years, the institute has also more than doubled its staff, and hired two new section leaders in the last three months, bringing the total up to seven.

Dr. Joshua Liao, one of the two new section leaders hired, said shortly after arriving in Austin in January that the institute’s prestigious recent history, as well as its promising future, attracted him to join the facility.

“I came here because the faculty here, they’ve already done a lot of outstanding work,” Liao said. “Since cancer is such a complicated issue ... if we work together as a team and share knowledge and experience, we have a better chance to advance the science more (quickly.”

Liao was previously a pathologist in his native China and a researcher at the prestigious Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, which selects winner for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

The expansion will provide space for up to 20 research sections, Dong said, and will be a top-notch facility, with cutting-edge tools.

“I think we will be real first-class,” Dong said. “We probably will be better than (research institutes) in the Twin Cities and other places.”

The new facilities, he said, will also help the institute attract the cream of the crop of cancer researchers.

Not only is the Hormel Institute providing hope for future generations of a cancer-free life, but is a legacy of generations of former Hormel Foods CEOs, albeit in an indirect way, Dong said.

“The institute is really the legacy of Jay C. Hormel and the generations of Hormel people. Every CEO later on becomes the chairman of the (Hormel) Foundation, so they all support this institute,” Dong said. The Hormel Foundation has provided much of the institute’s funding in the past, and has pledged $10 million toward the construction of the facility’s expansion