NEWS

Seed grants to support research on ovarian cancer, melanoma, other cancers

By AMY PHILBECK
UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center

CHAPEL HILL -- The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center has awarded seven seed grants worth a total of $197,500 for new studies in cancer research.

Funding has been provided by grants from businesses, charitable foundations and individuals. They support new and growing research projects in innovative areas, helping to launch smaller projects that could lead to more in-depth studies in the future.

Of the seven grants, six aim to translate laboratory findings into potential clinical use. The remaining study looks at cancer epidemiology.

Following are the newly funded projects, awarded to faculty in various School of Medicine departments:

• Dr. Christine Chung, postdoctoral fellow in the division of hematology and oncology, will use the relatively new technology of microarray analysis to better understand the changes in a patient’s body that lead to head and neck cancers. She will look specifically at gene patterns to identify how they relate to tumor behavior. 
  
  
• Dr. Ruth Lininger, assistant professor in the department of pathology and laboratory medicine, ultimately hopes her lab’s research may identify a gene that could be used in the future to screen for endometrial cancer in a non-invasive test during a routine gynecologic exam, as well as identify genes that may be targets for endometrial cancer treatment. 
  
  
• Dr. Andrew Morris, an associate professor in the department of cell and developmental biology, and Dr. Linda Van Le, associate professor in the department of obstetrics and gynecology, will focus specifically on therapeutic targets for ovarian cancer due to the current lack of effective therapies. Morris and Van Le believe a particular lipid common in the blood of ovarian cancer patients may be a potential target for future treatments. 
  
  
• Dr. Nancy Thomas, clinical associate professor in the department of dermatology, is looking at melanoma, which results from a little-understood combination of multiple genetic defects. She will examine a specific gene commonly mutated in melanoma patients in hopes that it will lead to the design of more effective treatments for melanoma and help identify how different patients would respond to specific treatments. 
  
  
• Dr. Charles Perou, an assistant professor of genetics, and Dr. Christoph Borchers, an assistant professor of biochemistry, plan to focus on characterizing the diversity of human breast tumors using proteomics and microarrays. These complementary approaches are expected to yield new biological insights into breast tumor biology, which could result in the identification of new subtypes of breast tumors with clinical importance. 
  
  
• Dr. Benjamin Calvo, associate professor and chief of the division of surgical oncology, and Dr. Bert O’ Neill, assistant professor in the division of medical oncology, will focus how to better determine a tumor’s response to treatment. O’Neil and Calvo will study methods to better predict which tumors will respond favorably to a given treatment program. These technologies will be key in light of the ever-increasing number of therapies available to treat a given tumor type. 
  
  
• Dr. David Ransohoff, professor in the department of medicine, is particularly interested in the development and implementation of cancer screening policy. He is involved in research to assess, on a statewide level, the overall use of colonoscopy in screening for colon cancer and in surveillance after removal of colon polyps.

Businesses, charitable foundations and individuals contributing to the center’s seed grant initiative are the A.E. Finley Foundation and the John William Pope Foundation, both of Raleigh; the A.W. McAlister Foundation and the Foundation of the Carolinas, both of Charlotte; the Brody Brothers’ Foundation and the Schechter Foundation of Kinston; the Brown W. Finch Foundation of Winston-Salem; the Carter Foundation and the Cemala Foundation of Greensboro; the Florence Rogers Charitable Trust of Fayetteville; the Ladies Auxiliary VFW of Norlina; Richard Byron Lupton of Worthington, Ohio; and the Neisler Foundation of Kings Mountain.

- 30 -

Lineberger center contact: Dianne G. Shaw, (919) 966-5905 or dgs@med.unc.edu