From Submarines to Childhood Cancer Research

During spring break of his sophomore year, Reynolds and his Navy ROTC roommate spent a week aboard the USS Patrick Henry, a nuclear submarine docked in Charleston, South Carolina. The medical officer aboard discovered Reynolds was a biology major and encouraged him to switch to pre-med.

Reynolds reminded him Navy ROTC regulations said pre-med majors were not allowed. The medical officer showed Reynolds new instructions, which opened up its program to pre-med majors. However, Reynolds interest remained low.

Once aboard the nuclear submarine, Reynolds and his roommate found themselves in the middle of what was known as Sherwood Forest, an area with 12 ballistic missile launch tubes loaded with 300-kiloton nuclear warheads.

“We were silent; we were speechless,” Reynolds says. “We saw somebody labeled the top of the fire control (launch) sequence buttons with ‘To Russia with love,’ and at the bottom they put ‘Repent.’ It got to me, and I started thinking about what I was training to do, and what this sub was capable of doing.”

Reynolds returned to Austin, changed his major to pre-med and went to the Navy ROTC office to tell them what he was doing. The office told him doing so would lead to his removal, but Reynolds showed them the new instruction.

The things he learned in that early class at UT, where he studied bacteria and how bacterial spore formation affected gene expression spurred an interest in cancer research.

At UT, Reynolds read a paper written by C. Everett Koop, MD, DSc, the U.S. surgeon general from 1982 to 1989, and Audrey Evans, MD, a British physician considered to be the Mother of Neuroblastoma.

“In the article, they had described (neuroblastoma) patients that would spontaneously regress; their cancer would just go away on its own,” Reynolds says. “And I thought that if it’ll go away on its own, we can make it do it; we can figure out how to make it regress.”

After a years of fortuitous events, chance meetings and generally being in front of the right people at the right time, Reynolds took his joint MD/PhD degree from UT and eventually made his way to UCLA and then to Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.

“At (Children’s), we ran a Phase I clinical trial of Accutane®, a retinoid we had shown could turn off the major oncogene driving neuroblastoma and stop the tumor cells from growing,” Reynolds explained. “Finally, the idea I had back when I was a sophomore in college turned out to be true: We got multiple complete responses in the bone marrow of these kids with neuroblastoma, and we managed to take that into a Phase III clinical trial that resulted in Accutane® being part of standard-of-care treatment for neuroblastoma worldwide. That’s when I decided what I really wanted to focus on was drug development.”

Despite his success, Reynolds and several lab team members at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles were unhappy in California. He heard about a physician-researcher in Lubbock, Harry Weitlauf, MD, who had convinced Steven Berk, MD, TTUHSC’s medical school dean, to recruit a cancer investigator who could help the university establish a cancer center. A deal was agreed upon, and Reynolds, along with Barry Maurer, MD, and Min Kang, PharmD, moved their labs to TTUHSC.

“The Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) has been incredibly good about funding childhood cancer research and making opportunities specifically available to childhood cancer investigators,” Reynolds says. “That’s the other thing about Texas: it cares about kids, which I can’t say for every place.”

—By Mark Hendricks