Some may look at the Baylor Sciences Building and just see classrooms. Some may look at a professor and only think of them as a teacher. But when you look closer, you’ll see the heart of Baylor’s mission. Inside the BSB, professors and students are engaged in groundbreaking research with the power to change lives.
In late January 2025, 24 innovators were named part of the fifth cohort of Texas Medical Center Innovation’s 2025 Accelerator for Cancer Therapeutics (ACT). One of those innovators is Daniel Romo, Ph.D., The Schotts Professor of Chemistry and co-director of the Baylor Synthesis and Drug-Lead Discovery Lab at Baylor University.
After earning a degree at Texas A&M, Romo took a Ph.D. at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, followed by a postdoc at Harvard University. He then returned to Texas A&M as an assistant professor, rising through the ranks, and after 21 years, he moved to Baylor in 2015. “It’s been quite a journey,” he said.
Working Toward a Cure
In one of his projects, Romo has recently focused on a new therapeutic for pancreatic cancer, the third leading cause of cancer-related deaths in the United States. For the past four years, he has collaborated with Susan E. Bates, M.D., a physician-scientist at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York City, who not only treats pancreatic cancer patients but also searches for new cancer therapies.
“It’s a marine sponge-derived natural product that turns out to be a protein translation inhibitor, which means it inhibits protein synthesis in cancer cells,” Romo said. “Dr. Bates was working on a compound that, when combined with what we were working on, had a really potent and unexpected synergistic effect against pancreatic cancer. We’re very excited about this combination therapy, and we’ve started a company — EpiTranslations LLC — to develop our ideas and ideally help those suffering from this awful disease.”
The time from a lightbulb moment to a successful new drug can span more than a decade. Even ideas that seem promising may not get the attention they deserve and often fall by the wayside.
“It’s definitely a long, long process,” Romo said. “I’ve been working with this particular class of natural products — compounds isolated from natural sources — now for 25 years, pretty much the whole time that I’ve been an independent investigator. I’ve worked with maybe 20, 30 different natural products over my career, but this one in particular has been one I’ve stuck with as it has so much potential.”
‘Research is Teaching, Too’
Baylor University achieved Research 1 status in 2021, the highest designation conferred by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education in recognition of the high levels of research activity, the number of research doctorates awarded, and the amount of funding allocated for scientific research. There are 187 R1 universities in the U.S., 16 of which are located in Texas.
The Baylor Sciences Building, completed in 2004, is at the heart of all research carried out at Baylor University. In the spirit of collaboration, this 508,000-square-foot teaching and research facility provides more than 200 research and teaching laboratories and 31 classrooms and lecture halls, housing six academic departments and more than 12 interdisciplinary research organizations.
“When I came to Baylor in 2013, there were tremendous facilities in place, and there was a great potential for growth,” said John Wood, Ph.D., the Robert A. Welch Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and co-director of the Baylor Synthesis & Drug-Lead Discovery Lab.
Wood completed his graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania and his postdoctoral studies at Harvard before taking an independent academic position at Yale University for 13 years. After working at Colorado State University, he came to Baylor in 2013, and is Baylor’s newest University Distinguished Professor.
“As of now, there are more than 20 research groups exploring different areas of chemistry and biochemistry,” he said. “The faculty in charge of those research groups formally have a 25 percent commitment to teaching and a 75 percent commitment to scholarly activities, which is research.”
However, Wood is quick to explain that the percentage breakdown of teaching to research may be misleading.
“Research is teaching, too,” he explained. You’re overseeing a laboratory full of undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students, discussing findings and talking next steps. There are group meetings. The reality is that there are teaching opportunities all day long.”
Romo explained how it works in his research group.
“We have a number of undergrads, of course, who are here to carry out research as part of their degree. Then we have grad students working towards their Ph.D., and currently, I have 11 Ph.D. students who are working on independent research projects under my supervision. And finally, I have five postdoctoral fellows who are basically honing their research skills, writing papers, and hoping to be discovered down the line by potential employers,” he said. “I encourage students to develop their own ideas and even argue with me about them constructively — that’s awesome when that happens.”
Securing Funding for Cancer Research
Cancer is a major research topic, and financial support is available if you can align your research to what the funding community is willing to champion.
“At least half of the research ongoing at Baylor has the potential of having an impact in some way or another on cancer as a disease,” Wood said. “Cancer is a very broad disease, and it comes in many forms, which means different types of research are required. Whether it’s how the blood gets to a tumor or what might prevent a tumor from growing, it’s just the nature of the disease that lends itself to a broad swath of research being applicable to it.”
Although securing funding can be challenging, Romo considers himself blessed to have some recent success.
“We have several grants, but the largest one, a Maximizing Investigators Research Award (R
35) — from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) — really fuels my research group,” Romo said. “I have to renew this grant every five years, and mine was up for renewal at the end of last year. I got word that it was renewed in January this year, and that was a blessing. We are hopefully okay for the next five years, but after that, we’ll have to see.”
Funding for cancer research is available from many different sources, including from the State of Texas through the Cancer Prevention Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) or private foundations like the Robert A. Welch Foundation, based in Houston. There are also private national foundations, such as the Arnold & Mabel Beckman Foundation, the Max and Victoria Dreyfus Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Government sources of funding include the NIH, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Energy.
While much of the research depends on securing the funding necessary to continue achieving successful outcomes, Wood emphasizes the true focus of research at Baylor University.
“Universities exist to educate people. We are not drug development companies,” he said. “Students who walk out of our doors become among the world’s best molecule builders, and they can go on and work at pharmaceutical companies or flavors and fragrance companies, or they can work in agriculture developing new pesticides or herbicides, improving human health, and our quality of life in a variety of different ways.
“One of the beauties of the research that we do is that we can try our wildest ideas and take things in directions we want to,” Wood added. “And the reality is that the new discoveries that drive the future of the world often come from those crazy ideas, those serendipitous things that you come across when you’re just trying something almost at a whim.”
