Sowing the Seeds of Innovation

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By Melissa Marino
June 17, 2010

 

How the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is stimulating cancer research

Ivanov’s new position – and the research project he was hired to work on – are examples of how the federal “stimulus” funding is enriching the research environment at Vanderbilt-Ingram. … Researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center have secured more than $73 million from 155 research grants. The funding is estimated to support 105 FTEs (full-time equivalents, or positions), according to Vanderbilt University’s office of Contract & Grant Accounting.

In an economic crisis that has led to some of the highest unemployment rates since the Great Depression, Sergey Ivanov, Ph.D., is very relieved to have found a position at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center.

Ivanov’s wife had accepted a new position at Vanderbilt, so the couple moved from New York to Nashville in 2009. But Ivanov didn’t have a job prospect lined up. He was out of work for several months – and was growing a bit concerned.

But the influx of research grants from the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act – the “stimulus” bill passed by Congress in February 2009 – had opened up an opportunity that fit with Ivanov’s years of expertise in developing mouse models of disease at the National Cancer Institute and translational research tools in New York University.

He was hired in November 2009 as a research assistant professor in the lab of Wendell Yarbrough, M.D., who was the recipient of two “stimulus” grants from the National Institutes of Health. The two-year Challenge Grants (a highly competitive grant category with about 4 percent of applications funded) provided more than $1.4 million for Yarbrough’s lab to further his research in head and neck cancer and to develop a new mouse model for salivary gland cancer – a rare but vicious type of cancer that can affect the facial nerves.

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