Six teams of scientists at The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center – Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute (OSUCCC – James) are each receiving two-year, $100,000 Pelotonia Research Awards to fund “high-risk, high-reward” research projects.
The grants are funded with a portion of the $8 million raised during the 2010 Pelotonia cycling tour to support cancer research at the OSUCCC – James. (For information about Pelotonia 2012, visit http://pelotonia.org.)
Grant recipients were selected in a highly competitive process from 50 applications. The applications were scored and the top projects were selected for funding by senior leaders at the OSUCCC – James, says Peter Shields, MD, deputy director of Ohio State’s Comprehensive Cancer Center.
“I was impressed with the potential these ideas have and the collaborative nature of all the projects,” Shields says.
“These Pelotonia research awards encourage our investigators to collaboratively develop novel ideas that can lead to breakthroughs in science, prevention and treatments,” says Michael A. Caligiuri, MD, director of Ohio State’s Comprehensive Cancer Center and chief executive officer of The James Cancer Hospital and Solove Research Institute. “Pelotonia provides critically needed seed funding for ideas that may one day lead to larger, federally funded grants.”
A List of 2011 Pelotonia Research Award Recipients and Their Research Objectives Follows:
• Patrick Green, PhD, and Robert Baiocchi, MD, PhD: Develop a promising therapeutic approach for treatment of an aggressive adult T-cell leukemia by studying a specific cellular protein and testing a new class of drugs in a preclinical model of human ATL.
• Tsonwin Hai, PhD, John C. Byrd, MD, and David Lucas, PhD: Improve the treatment of chronic lymphocytic leukemia by developing agents to modulate a specific gene pathway in both the organism with cancer and the cancer cells themselves
• Bhuvaneswari Ramaswamy, MD, Sarmila Majumder, PhD, Xiaobai Li, PhD, Lisa Yee, MD, Mike Ostrowski, PhD, and Gustavo Leone, PhD: Explore ways to identify breast tumors that have higher risk of developing into invasive cancer, and treat them by blocking a specific signaling pathway involved in breast development.
• Qianben Wang, PhD, and Victor Jin, PhD: Develop novel therapies to treat hormone-independent prostate cancer by targeting specific gene-signaling pathways.
• Amanda Toland, PhD, Thomas Olencki, DO, Dawn Allain and Ted Teknos, MD: Identify genomic changes that cause squamous cell carcinoma of the skin to metastasize, in order to develop therapies to treat these aggressive tumors.
• Jianhua Yu, PhD, and Kalpana Ghoshal, PhD: Develop novel therapeutics and preventive agents for liver cancer by targeting specific gene-signaling pathways.