Matthew J. Lazzara, Kevin A. Janes and a team of 14 other UVA faculty and staff were awarded a $12.3 million, five-year research grant from the National Institutes of Health and the National Cancer Institute to establish the Systems Analysis of Stress-Adapted Cancer Organelles, or SASCO, Center at UVA. The team includes biomedical and chemical engineers, cell biologists and biochemists, and medical-surgical oncologists, and spans eight departments across the schools of Engineering and Medicine.
The SASCO Center is developing approaches that integrate cutting-edge experimental and computational methods to identify druggable vulnerabilities in breast, colon and brain cancers. The center investigators hypothesize that the genetics that allows cancer cells to so successfully proliferate might also create stresses in those cells, a flaw that could be exploited to create better therapies.
“The establishment of this new center cements UVA as a national leader in cancer systems biology and will have long-lasting impact on your institution, faculty and trainees,” Douglas A. Lauffenburger, Ford Professor of Bioengineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said.
Besides Lazzara and Janes, the team includes Kristen A. Atkins, Todd W. Bauer, Cheryl A. Borgman, Andrea H. Denton, Mohammad Fallahi-Sichani, David F. Kashatus, Kristen M. Naegle, Jason Papin, Benjamin W. Purow, Gustavo K. Rohde, Shayna L. Showalter, P. Todd Stukenberg, David Wotton and Hui Zong. [more]