Outstanding Faculty Researcher Award

Award Winners for year 2004
Associate Professor Shazib Pervaiz & Associate Professor Marie Veronique Clement (Team Award)
Dept of Physiology & Dept of Biochemistry

Assoc Profs Pervaiz and Clement have clinched the University Award - Outstanding Researcher Award (Team Award) for 2005. They have been extremely productive over the past 8.5 years since joining NUS. Their major research interest involves the role of reactive oxygen species in apoptotic cell death. Together, they have jointly published a total of 19 papers since joining NUS. (Individually, Assoc Prof Pervaiz has published 28 papers and Assoc Prof Clement has published 23 papers), with a total impact factor of 116.694.

A major contribution has been to redefine the role of intracellular reactive oxygen species in cell death and survival. They were the first to show the divergent effects of intracellular superoxide and hydrogen peroxide on apoptotic signaling pathways in cancer cells. To that end, their work highlighted the death inhibitory effect of superoxide anion (in receptor - and drug-induced models), and linked tumor intracellular pro-oxidant milieu to drug resistance. In parallel, their studies demonstrated the death promoting effect of intracellular hydrogen peroxide, and linked drug-induced hydrogen peroxide production to the generation of a permissive intracellular environment for death execution of cancer cells. Taken together, the group has shed light on fundamental mechanisms governing and regulating cell death, which has tremendous implications to our understanding of carcinogenesis and drug resistance in cancer therapeutics.

Their work calls for a need to address the redox status of the cell in chemotherapy to combat drug resistance and provide a rational basis for the selection of combinatorial strategies in chemotherapeutic treatment of cancer.