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Vanderbilt lung cancer researcher receives LUNGevity award
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Jonathan Lehman, MD, PhD, instructor in medicine in the division of hematology/oncology at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center, received a career development award from LUNGevity, a nonprofit organization that provides funding for scientific research, supports patients with lung cancer and their families, and promotes disease prevention and other public education efforts.
The career development awards help stimulate the research of early-career scientists and also promote their leadership development.
The grant will support Lehman’s research in small cell lung cancer, which accounts for about 15% of all lung cancers and is responsible for more than 30,000 deaths each year in the United States.
Chemotherapy is a standard treatment for small cell lung cancer, but many patients quickly develop resistance and die within a year. No targeted therapies are approved for this patient population.
Lehman’s research focuses on how small cell lung cancers become resistant to therapy.
“Our preliminary data has identified multiple novel subpopulations of cells in small cell lung cancer,” Lehman said in a press release. “We are working to better characterize this diversity by using a novel technique that can identify levels of more than 40 different cell surface markers simultaneously in individual cells. This will give us a signaling and surface marker map.”
Lehman and colleagues then will compare this map with those from human tumors grown in an animal model prior to and after chemotherapy treatment so researchers can assess how tumors change with treatment.