Students, peers work to keep Fayad’s research moving forward at USC

Arpit Saxena and the other graduate students who had been working under Raja Fayad at the University of South Carolina have struggled the past few weeks.

They have been dealing with their mentor’s shooting death in his office at the University of South Carolina while contemplating the future of his important research into the causes of colon cancer.

“It’s taking a little time for us to adjust to what has happened,” Saxena said. “Even though he’s not with us, the mind tells us he’s just away at a conference.”

Fayad’s ex-wife shot him and took her own life on Feb. 5. The next month happened to be Colon Cancer Awareness Month. Usually, that means appeals for people in the high-risk age groups to get colonoscopies. This year, spreading the awareness of Fayad’s importance in the colon cancer research world seemed more appropriate to his students, friends and co-workers.

Fayad and his graduate students were examining the impact of diet, exercise and obesity on the incidence of inflammatory bowel disease and colon cancer. It’s the kind of important research that, while far from the eureka moment of finding a cure, provides foundational building blocks in that effort.

Fayad had published dozens of papers on the subject in peer review journals. There will be more with his name on them, with much of the lab work done by Saxena, fellow doctorate student Kamaljeet Kaur and master’s degree students Alexander Sougiannis and Sarah Depaepe.

“I’m 100 percent sure we’ll be finishing his studies,” said Saxena, a doctorate student who has shared credit with Fayad on several papers in the past few years. “We will try our best to publish them.”

The students aren’t alone. Fayad’s faculty peers are determined that Fayad’s fast-growing legacy will continue to expand. James Carson, chair of the exercise science department and associate director of the Center for Colon Cancer Research at USC, expects to take the supervisory role on some studies. Environmental health science researcher Anindya Chanda and mechanical engineering researcher Sourav Banerjee have pledged to continue a project they were working on with Fayad.

They all know, however, the work won’t feel the same without Fayad’s combination of enthusiasm, good data, collaboration and persistence.

“These are challenging times for everybody for (research) funding,” Carson said. “Raja was persevering, staying very positive. He was trying to generate preliminary data and give a good rationale to get larger grants and do bigger studies. And where a lot of people would give up, he was moving forward, collaborating with other people, trying to build a body of work to get the bigger grants.”

Fayad came to USC in 2008 as an associate professor in the Arnold School of Public Health from the University of Illinois-Chicago, brought in with funding from a major colon cancer research grant. “We not only hired a really good scientist who was coming along and doing well, but as a teacher and a person who dealt with the students, he was really starting to blossom in those areas,” said Larry Durstine, who as then-chair of the exercise science department helped lure Fayad to Columbia.

Fayad earned a medical degree at Aleppo University School of Medicine in Syria in 1995. Leaning on that medical background, with work in nutrition, he focused on natural causes and solutions to colon cancer.

Several of his studies dealt with selenium, a trace element found in the soil and many foods and spices. Unnaturally high levels of selenium in the body can be toxic, but one of Fayad’s studies showed a deficiency of selenium impacts the ability to combat inflammation. Colon cancer usually begins with inflammation.

He led other promising studies dealing with a link between a component of fat tissue and colon cancer development, which would help explain the higher rates of the cancer among the obese. And he was working with Chanda and Vanerjee on the role of microbiome – the microbial species that are in everyone’s gut – in colon cancer formation.

Some researchers might focus on one avenue. Fayad attacked problems from as many vantage points as possible. He had that kind of passion for what he was doing.

“He must have been here less than a week when he came to my office,” said Frank Berger, director of the Center for Colon Cancer Research. “I said ‘Welcome to Columbia.’ He says ‘Oh thanks. Great to be here. Can you tell me who the clinicians are around here that I can get human tissues from?’

“He was ready to go from the day he got here. He really wanted to develop clinical interactions. He was on the phone to these guys within a week.”

Great researchers need that kind of excitement about what they do.

“I can remember him coming to my office a couple of times that he didn’t get a grant funded,” Berger said. “He’d tell me about what the criticisms were, and he’d say ‘But I’ve got new data.’

“He was ready to go back in with a revised proposal. I never saw him depressed over this or angry. He’d say ‘I’ve got new data, I can respond to this. We’ve got new ideas here.’”

Now his peers and students will have to continue with those ideas, and build on them with new ones. Saxena said he was nearly finished with a paper to be submitted to the Journal of Inflammation. He had given the paper to Fayad to critique the day before he died.

When that paper is published, Saxena said, Fayad’s name will be among the list of authors, in the last spot reserved for the principle investigator. That will be one of the last ones where Fayad’s name gets such treatment, but his work and his impact on his students ensure the legacy will sustain much longer.

This story was originally published March 20, 2015 at 7:52 PM with the headline "Students, peers work to keep Fayad’s research moving forward at USC."