82 new research and training grants awarded

 

​They total $47.4M and will fund investigators at 59 institutions.

The American Cancer Society has approved funding for 82 research and training grants totaling $47.4 million. The grants will fund investigators at 59 institutions across the country and include 67 new grants and 15 renewals of previous grants. All the grants were funded in 2021.   

The grants include the renewal of one Research Professorship to Anil K. Sood, MD, of the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, pictured above. The Research Professorship is a lifelong designation accompanied by a five-year $400,000 commitment and is our most prestigious research grant. 

“We are excited to support innovative research poised to contribute to advancing efforts to prevent, find, treat, and improve the quality of life for cancer survivors,” said Ellie Daniels, MD, MPH, senior vice president of Extramural Discovery Science. “Workforce diversity and inclusion and health equity are also foundational to our funded research.”  

To maximize our impact, ACS has established six priority research areas to advance our mission: 

• Etiology or causes of cancer
• Obesity/healthy eating and active living
• Diagnosis and screening
• Treatment
• Survivorship
• Health equity across the continuum

These topics will require fundamental, preclinical, clinical, and implementation research, as well as multidisciplinary research teams to tackle the complexities of cancers and cancer care.  

Requiring alignment of Extramural Discovery Science grant applications with identified high-potential areas for significantly reducing the burdens of cancer in the U.S. is critical at this time. The number of research priorities are relatively few, yet these topics cast a wide net spanning the full cancer research continuum and requiring multidisciplinary teams to tackle the complexities of cancer. 

Here is one of the highlights in the current grant cycle:    
Hanlee Ji, MD - Stanford University, Stanford CA   
Novel Immunotherapeutic Targets in the Gastric Tumor Microenvironment  
Mission Boost Grant  
Gastric cancer that has metastasized has few effective treatments. Dr. Li’s team has analyzed the composition of immune cells surrounding gastric cancer, referred to as the tumor microenvironment, and identified two protein receptors that are expressed in these cells: GITR and TIGIT. Using an innovative experimental system, they will examine the effects of targeting these proteins to develop a new immunotherapy strategy for gastric cancer.   

*Shared from MySocietySource.