When Anil Sood first finished his oral board examinations in oncology, he had four job offers in cushy medical practices where he was offered two to three times what he was making as a researcher. But the scion of a business family went into low-paying research.
It may not have made Sood rich, but patients around the world may gain from what he found because he stuck with research.
Sood knew that when cells were taken out of their natural settings they underwent a special kind of suicide called anoikis.
But he learned that in both mice and men, stress increased levels of a protein (focal adhesion molecule) that protected the cancer cell from committing suicide. These doughty cancer cells spread the cancer to other parts of the body.
Sood believes it is possible to have drugs to gum up the chemical switches for the stress hormones. This would ensure cancer cells continued to remain vulnerable to a suicide, thus not endangering the body.
His father, Jaginder, a financial analyst, had originally hoped Sood could become a computer programmer. But the family did not object to him joining medical school at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. After he graduated, he was not convinced that he was doing enough to save patients.
"We do a lot of really big surgeries, especially for ovarian cancer patients. And the patients still develop recurrent (cancer) and still die (of it) a lot of times. That's frustrating. We put our patients through so much and, at the end, it seems there should be better ways of helping our patients," he said.
"When I became a senior medical student, what I found more frustrating was that you become very technical. You operate on a patient and then you send the patient out and you have other doctors manage the patients. And that I just didn't like. I wanted to give a more complete treatment."
Sood, who came over from India with his family when he was 14, believes he was protected from a sense of entitlement because he grew up in India. He cites the example of his children, Nathan, 9, and Meghan, 6, who go out to play soccer.
"At the end of the season, they all get trophies. I don't recall getting that in India," he says, adding that not having it easy was good for him.
