NIH grant bolsters search for new cancer drugs
By Bill Snyder
October 16, 2009
Researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center have received a two-year, $4.7 million “Grand Opportunities” stimulus grant from the National Institutes of Health to launch a ground-breaking cancer drug discovery program.
The Vanderbilt Molecular Target Discovery and Development Center, a joint effort of the Vanderbilt Institute of Chemical Biology (VICB) and the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center, initially will hone in on “triple-negative” breast cancer, a particularly deadly form of the disease.
Researchers will try to identify genes that are the “drivers” for the different subtypes of triple-negative breast cancer, and then fashion drugs to block the action of the proteins encoded by the genes, with the intent of killing the cancer cells.
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