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Professors receive grant from NCI
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Two researchers from Mount Sinai School of Medicine received a 5-year grant through the NCI’s Provocative Questions program.
Stuart Aaronson, MD, professor and chair of oncological sciences, and Ross Cagan, PhD, professor of oncological sciences, at Mount Sinai, each will receive $351,713 in the first year.
The NCI established its Provocative Questions grant program to help researchers explore important but less obvious questions about cancer.
Aaronson’s grant will support research into signaling pathways responsible for Wnt oncogene addiction.
“While increasing efforts are being made to develop effective inhibitors of Wnt signaling in tumors, to date, few, if any, have entered into clinical development,” Aaronson said in a press release. “Our NCI grant will support our research to identify and characterize specific and potent Wnt-targeted drugs that can disrupt this oncogene addiction in tumor cells and increase the efficacy of therapy for Wnt-activated human cancers.”
Cagan and colleagues will use the grant money to create a model of pancreatic cancer in fruit flies to learn the molecular signatures that predict how a tumor responds to diet-induced obesity.
“This NCI grant will allow us to better explore the pathways that link obesity to enhanced tumor growth and to explore whether compounds that address this link are potentially useful as treatments,” Cagan said in the release.