Vanderbilt Gets $4.7 Million for Triple-Negative Research

From Vanderbilt Medical Center's Weekly Newspaper:

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.

“The beauty of this approach is that if you end up with drugs at the end of this whole process, you already know which patients should get them,” said VICB director Lawrence Marnett, Ph.D., and the grant's principal investigator. More.