American Cancer Society awards research grants to 109 investigators at 77 institutions ...( ATLANTAOctober 04 2007 The American...),Health

ATLANTAOctober 04, 2007 The American Cancer Society, the largest non-government, not-for-profit funding source of cancer research in the United States, has awarded 109 national research and training grants totaling more than $52.6 million in the first of two grant cycles for 2008. Of the grants, 91 are new and 18 are renewals of previous grants. All of the grants go into effect January 1, 2008.

The American Cancer Societys Research and Training Program has funded 40 Nobel Prize laureates since its inception in 1946, during which time it has invested about $3.1 billion in cancer research, much of that focusing on the work of promising new investigators. The Society currently funds 938 multi-year grants totaling over $457 million. Among the newly awarded grants approved for funding:

• Katherine Crew, MD of Columbia University in New York, N.Y. is examining the role of green tea extracts to possibly lower the risk of ER-negative breast cancer, a form of breast cancer which is often found in younger women and associated with a poorer prognosis.

• Prasak Jallepalli, MD, PhD of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. N.Y. is investigating a new function for the protein, Polo kinase, which is higly overexpressed in many cancers and can turn on major cell division pathways at exactly the right time and right place.

• Nomeli Nunez, PhD of the University of Texas, Austin is working on understanding the relationship in post-menopausal women between obesity and an increase in breast cancer.

• Adam Marcus, PhD of Emory University in Atlanta, Ga. is studying how non-small cell lung cancer takes on aggressive metastatic characteristics and how a particular tumor suppressor, named LKB1, plays a role when it triggers the front part of a cell to become indistinguishable from the end.

• Sara Higgins, PhD of Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, N.Y. focuse
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