NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Fifteen young investigators from across the country have been awarded grants totaling $200,000 from the Sidney Kimmel Foundation for Cancer Research, including several engaged in a range of genetic and genomic research projects, the foundation said today.
The Kimmel Scholar Awards program aims to support the careers of young cancer researchers who have not yet received major grants from the National Cancer Institute or other funding sources. The foundation has a particular interest in funding investigators and physicians involved in research projects that could be translated quickly into benefits for cancer patients.
Previous grant winners have gone on to receive millions in funding from NCI and the National Institutes of Health and to make "significant contributions to the field of cancer research," the foundation said.
Among this crop of award winners are several investigators pursuing genome-based projects, including:
Craig Ceol of the University of Massachusetts Medical School, who is using comparative genomics to identify novel regulators of melanoma progression;
Puneeth Iyengar from University of Texas – Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, who is developing a genomic signature for predicting cachexia-inducing tumors to facilitate early therapeutic intervention;
Michael Kharas at the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research, who is seeking to understand the role the musashi-2 gene plays in myeloid leukemia;
Ryan O'Connell of the University of Utah, who is investigating the roles of microRNAs during antitumor immunity;
Eirini Papapetrou from the University of Washington, who is mining cancer genomes using directly reprogrammed and genetically engineered human pluripotent stem cells;
And Matthias Stadtfeld at New York University School of Medicine, who is studying imprinted gene dysregulation in cancer.