NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Non-profit fundraising organization Stand Up to Cancer announced today that it has awarded $1 million in grants to five cancer research teams through the Phillip A. Sharp Innovation in Collaboration award program.
The program was established in 2014 to honor Sharp's interest in collaborative research. Each of this year's winning teams, which are composed of senior scientists and early-career researchers, will receive $200,000.
"The research teams who submitted proposals for consideration are from quite diverse backgrounds and are innovating across a broad portfolio of projects," William Nelson, director of the Johns Hopkins Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center and member of the award committee, said in a statement. "Moreover, the teams are unusually diverse: physicists, computer scientists, computational mathematicians and engineers coming into the lab with oncologists, geneticists and biologists to explore and test hypotheses emerging from the terabytes of new data we're now producing."
Among the winners are Muhammed Murtaza of the Translational Genomics Research Institute and Antoni Ribas of the University of California, Los Angeles, who are collaborating on a project entitled, "Fingerprinting the systemic microbiome in plasma to predict immunotherapy outcomes in melanoma;" Shelley Berger of the Van Andel Research Institute and the University of Pennsylvania's Carl June and Junwei Shi for a project entitled, "Defining the role of epigenetics in chimeric antigen receptor T cell therapy for CLL;" Mount Sinai Hospital's Benjamin Greenbaum and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center's Jedd Wolchok for a project entitled, "Checkpoint inhibition in children with ultra-mutated cancer due to biallelic mismatch repair deficiency;" and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute's Eliezer Van Allen and Memorial Sloan Kettering's Maria Jasin for a project entitled, "Functional verification of DNA repair mutations in prostate and ovary tumors."