Shaoguang Li

BAR HARBOR — The incentives for Jackson Laboratory founder Clarence Cook Little’s lifelong efforts to understand hereditary susceptibility to cancer likely included the emotional reality that his father died of leukemia.

Some of the inbred mouse strains that he and other genetic pioneers developed after the Lab was built in 1929 were highly susceptible to cancers that disrupt the formation and development of blood cells, the same disease process that killed “Pete” Little’s father.

Nearly 80 years later, leukemia continues to be a human plague, with some types specifically targeting children. An eight-member research team now headed by Dr. Shaoguang Li has spent the past six years unraveling the molecular mechanics that underpin the disease and developing new clinical strategies for manipulating the gene interactions involved.

To no small degree, the circuitous career path that brought Li from China to The Jackson Lab in 2002 was grounded in frustration.

“Like others who are here, I came for one reason: to do top-level research,” Li said. “The environment and the infrastructure allow them to reach their goal. This country, somehow, provides that kind of environment. Globally, the ability for this country to do research is a powerful one.”

As a physician in China, Li lived and worked in many locations, but came to the United States in 1989 from Beijing.

“At that time, I began realizing that so many medical problems cannot be solved,” he said. “Even at this time, as well, we always face new challenges. If I was only working as a physician, without doing research, I could never solve these problems. I would only be hearing what other people told me to do as I practiced.”

Doing both research and hands-on patient care was not an option in China, he decided. Li opted to come to the United States, earning a doctorate in molecular biology and taking on research full time while studying and working at Tulane University in New Orleans and at the Harvard Medical School in Boston.

His focus now, he said, is simple: curing leukemia. Other diseases, too, he says, adding “you have to start somewhere.”

“Many years ago, during my training, I used to deal with blood cancer,” he said. “Leukemia is what I’m most familiar with, and it’s an important human disease. A lot of children suffer from that. For many there is no cure. It’s hard to see them suffering and go away. For some reason, you never forget it.”

What attracted Li to The Jackson Laboratory, he said, is a collaborative atmosphere he didn’t experience at Harvard or Tulane.

“Everybody here is on the same team,” he said. “Whether you are doing developmental biology, hematology or metabolic disease, we’re all colleagues.  There are no departments, like there are at a university. And why do you need that? These days, the human body as a whole involves everything, so why do you want to confine yourself? People often break the rules to collaborate with other departments, yes, but, at Harvard in particular, it is very difficult to collaborate, even between the floors.

“Jackson Lab is like a family-oriented place,” he said. “People tend to know each other well and help each other well. It’s a family environment that makes you feel like you may be important. You feel like you are surrounded by people who really support you in any way they can.

“For anybody really committed to science and solving problems, this is the place to do that.”

In terms of transferring his pure science research into applied science clinical approaches to treating leukemia, Li’s team has been working with the Novartis pharmaceutical company to develop drug therapies that prolong remission of different forms of leukemia. They include B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia, the most common type affecting children.

Li’s eight-member research team is now focusing on the role of stem cells in blood disease such as leukemia.

Li says he’s seeing more and more Chinese scientists join The Jackson Laboratory research effort as it continues to expand from a status quo of 38 research teams to a long-term goal of 55.

“We are recruiting like crazy these days,” he said. “We want to double the Lab’s size in the next five years. A lot of the candidates who are applying or coming in for interviews are Chinese. I think The Jackson Lab looks at myself and what I’ve done, and they realize that this might be a capable group of people. I may be changing their view. Before I came here [the number of Chinese researchers] was really nominal. Now there are maybe 20 or 30 Chinese researchers here, so we are sort of a small community.”