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Samuel Waxman Cancer Research Foundation awards $1.4 million in grants
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The Samuel Waxman Cancer Research Foundation awarded $1.4 million worth of new grants to fund investigations into multiple scientific areas.
The grants — which will fund research from 2019 through 2021 in areas such as aging and cancer, abnormal gene expression, differentiation therapy and epigenetic therapy — bring to more than $2 million the amount of donor-supported funding the foundation has awarded for cancer research this year.
The foundation now funds 50 physician-scientists as part of its Institute Without Walls initiative, intended to promote collaboration and break down institutional silos.
“The [foundation] is making a substantial investment in funding cutting-edge research ideas that show remarkable promise for uncovering abnormal gene expression in cancer and developing less toxic therapies,” Samuel Waxman, MD, founder and CEO of the foundation, said in a press release. “ We welcome these scientists to the [foundation’s] Institute Without Walls, which will expand our network of scientists committed to cross-disciplinary and cross-institutional collaboration as a mechanism to hasten discoveries . ”
The grant recipients and their research focus areas are:
- Tyler J. Curiel, MD, MPH, of The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio — Age effects of T cell stem cells, cancer stem cells and immune checkpoints on cancer immunotherapy;
- Ronald M. Evans, PhD, of The Salk Institute for Biological Studies — FXR as a novel therapeutic target in colitis-induced colorectal cancer;
- Maria E. Figueroa, MD, of University of Miami — The role of age-related reprogramming of KLF6 in HSC dysfunction and myeloid malignancies;
- Jan Karlseder, PhD, of The Salk Institute for Biological Studies — The regulation of proliferative boundaries by autophagy;
- Ross Levine, MD, of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center — Determining the role of somatic clonal evolution in aging, hematopoiesis and predisposition to malignancies;
- Joel Neilson, PhD, of Baylor College of Medicine — In vivo disruption of a novel translation pre-initiation complex as a putative therapeutic vulnerability for breast cancer differentiation therapy; and
- Emmanuelle Passegue, PhD, of Columbia University — Autophagy and hematopoietic stem cell function in aging and leukemia.
The nonprofit Samuel Waxman Cancer Research Foundation funds cutting-edge research that identifies and corrects abnormal gene function that causes cancer. Since its inception in 1976, the foundation has awarded approximately $100 million to support the work of more than 200 researchers worldwide.