On The Daily: A Michigan Medicine Cancer Researcher Receives $ 6.5 Million From The National Cancer Institute



[ad_1]

Arul Chinnaiyan, a member of the Rogel Cancer Center at the University of Michigan, has received an outstanding researcher award and a $ 6.5 million grant from the National Cancer Institute. Over the next seven years, this grant will fund Chinnaiyan's research on understanding genetic markers and cancer treatments that can be targeted to specific markers.

"The grant will fund research aimed at creating new bioinformatics resources and identifying new cancer biomarkers to improve diagnosis and, ultimately, develop new targeted therapies," said Michigan Medicine. press release said.

The Exceptional Investigator Scholarship, rather than funding a specific project, provides renowned researchers with support through a grant nearly three times that of a traditional individual researcher award. Through the R35 grant program developed by the National Cancer Institute, the seven-year extended funding period is intended to provide flexible, long-term support to researchers.

"The field of precision oncology continues to evolve with the overarching goal of providing cancer patients with improved diagnostic and prognostic capabilities and better treatments," Chinnaiyan said. "This grant will help us identify new biomarkers and understand their biological roles in cancer progression."

Chinnaiyan, who is also the director of the Michigan Center for Translational Pathology and Professor of Pathology and Urology SP Hicks Endowed at the University of Michigan Medical School, is considered one of the top researchers in precision oncology in the country. In 2010, he founded the Michigan Oncology Sequencing Program at the Rogel Cancer Center, which recruited more than 3,000 patients and produced several publications. The program is researching the sequencing of DNA and RNA metastatic cancers and normal tissues to look for changes that may improve treatment.

The Chinnaiyan laboratory also analyzed long non-coding RNAs, a relatively unexplored part of the human genome. New information suggests that new research on ncRNAs could improve the diagnosis, prognosis or treatment of cancer. The prize received will help with this research.

"We want to further characterize the dark matter of the genome. Some of these lncRN will certainly be very useful as biomarkers of cancer and we think that a subset is important in biological processes, "Chinnaiyan said. "We hope patients will have a molecular model of their tumor to guide treatment choices."

[ad_2]
Source link