Foundation awards grants to address disparities in lung cancer
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The Lung Cancer Research Foundation awarded $300,000 worth of research grants to two investigators who will investigate strategies to reduce disparities in lung cancer.
Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death. The malignancy disproportionately affects individuals with low socioeconomic status, those who live in rural areas, and those who belong to different racial or ethnic groups. These groups also face barriers to screening, biomarker testing and clinical trial participation.
“Research funding on disparities in lung cancer is critical to understanding the reasons behind these inequities and designing solutions to address them,” Katerina Politi, PhD, associate professor of pathology and internal medicine at Yale School of Medicine and chair of Lung Cancer Research Foundation’s scientific advisory board, said in a press release. “Certain groups of individuals are more susceptible due, for example, to environmental factors or have limited access to quality care. We are confident that the projects we are funding will lead to advancements in the field that will help to overcome some of these gaps.”
This year’s grant recipients will receive $150,000 each over 2 years.
They are Loretta Erhunmwunsee, MD, and Mariam Jamal-Hanjani, MD, PhD.
Erhunmwunsee is assistant professor in the division of thoracic surgery and assistant professor in the division of health equities at City of Hope. Her research focuses on understanding the impact of social and environmental determinants on non-small cell lung cancer diagnosis and survival in communities of color.
She will use the grant to evaluate the social determinants that impact lung cancer screening adherence among racial or ethnic minority individuals who smoke, and to develop an artificial intelligence predictive tool to determine which people who undergo low-dose CT will be at high risk for nonadherence.
“Because communities of color have the highest risk and mortality from NSCLC, we must assure that they do not also miss [lung cancer screening] opportunities,” Erhunmwunsee said in a press release. “I believe that understanding and intervening on what leads the most vulnerable to poor health will improve the health of the whole population.”
Jamal-Hanjani is a clinician scientist and clinical associate professor at University College London Cancer Institute.
She will use the grant to study if air pollution is driving lung cancer development among never-smokers through alterations of the lung microenvironment that subsequently promote expansion of EGFR-mutant cells.
“There is so much we do not know about environmental factors and their effect on how the human body responds,” Jamal-Hanjani said in the release. “Understanding the causes behind lung cancer in never-smokers and being able to identify risks for people who do not smoke but live and work in geographies with poor environmental conditions will help to improve early screening and detection for those affected populations.”
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