NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Oregon Health & Science University announced today that the OHSU Knight Cancer Institute has been awarded a five-year grant worth $9.2 million to serve as a research center for the National Cancer Institute's Cancer Systems Biology Consortium (CSBC).
As part of the consortium, the Knight Cancer Institute will work to develop strategies for treating drug-resistant triple negative breast cancer by analyzing core cell lines, patient-derived cultures, and primary tumors to identify molecular networks underlying disease progression and therapeutic response.
"Our goals in the CSBC research center are to identify the mechanisms by which these [triple negative breast cancers] evolve and adapt to become resistant to treatment, and to develop new strategies to counter these mechanisms," Joe Gray, associate director of biophysical oncology at the Knight Cancer Institute, said in a statement. "Our multidisciplinary approach treats these cancers as adaptive systems that can be controlled using multiple drug combinations."
The CSBC was launched in late 2015 with nearly $40 million as a network of research centers focused on studying cancer initiation, progression, and metastasis. Current members include Stanford University, Yale University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, the University of Texas Health Science Center, the University of Utah, and the University of California, San Francisco.