AACR-MPM Oncology Charitable Foundation awards grants to cancer researchers
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American Association for Cancer Research and MPM Capital awarded two grants that will provide a combined $800,000 for cancer research.
These are the first grants funded through the AACR-MPM Oncology Charitable Foundation Transformative Cancer Research Grants program.
The grant recipients are Sahand Hormoz, PhD, assistant professor of data sciences at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and Liron Bar-Peled, PhD, investigator in Center for Cancer Research at Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center. Each will receive $400,000 over 2 years.
Hormoz will study how genetic alterations in stem cells that generate new blood cells can disrupt normal blood development and cause myeloproliferative neoplasms.
Hormoz will reconstruct the lineage history of the mutated stem cells and characterize them by leveraging a single-cell profiling technology platform developed in his lab.
The findings likely will improve understanding of when myeloproliferative neoplasm-like blood cancers originated in individual patients and how they evolved over time. This could transform treatment by enabling the development of targeted therapies.
“This award recognizes the importance of innovative research and gives my lab the freedom to tackle fundamental questions in blood cancers using creative approaches that otherwise would not be possible,” Hormoz said in a press release.
Bar-Peled will focus on understanding how metabolic reprogramming in cancer cells can be targeted to develop therapeutic strategies.
Using novel proteomic and metabolomic technologies, he hopes to understand how altered metabolic pathways in cancer cells induce a form of cell death known as ferroptosis. This could improve understanding of how cells succumb to ferroptosis.
“We are now emboldened to undertake creative and cutting-edge research to address fundamental biochemical mechanisms by which cancer cells adapt to metabolic stress,” Bar-Peled said in the release. “The ultimate goal is to translate these basic discoveries into therapeutic insights for [patients with cancer].”