Efficient cancer treatment with minimal side effects, an education framework, and a workforce pipeline — these are the lofty goals of a leadership group that includes four researchers from the University of Tennessee Health Science Center (UTHSC), who recently were awarded $20 million.
This is the first grant for a collaboration between UTHSC, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), and the University of Tennessee Knoxville. Peter Buckley, M.D., chancellor of UTHSC, said, in a press release, that this initiative is part of a larger effort to build a bridge for collaboration between the organizations.
“In my more than 30 years at UTHSC, I have been privileged to work with outstanding researchers dedicated to uncovering treatments for cancer,” Gabor Tigyi, one researcher who is part of the initiative's leadership group, said in the release. “This project takes that life’s work in a new and exciting direction.”
The project is one of two Convergent Research Initiatives (CRI) that are collaborations between the University of Tennessee (UT) and ORNL. These initiatives were chosen from 54 proposals submitted by the collaborating organizations’ joint research teams.
“These two new Convergent Research Initiatives, along with an additional CRI next year will bring more than 100 new UT and ORNL researchers together across our state to tackle some of our nation’s biggest challenges, while also bringing in new funds to Tennessee,” UT president Randy Boyd said in the release.
The goal of the initiative is to develop a new treatment that uses a cancer-treating therapy and imaging to target cancer cells.
In addition to new radiopharmaceutical cancer therapies, the team plans to establish a conduit for radiopharmaceutical companies to come to Tennessee. They hope to accomplish this through creating a new education framework and workforce development pipeline.
The core leadership team for the initiative includes:
- Tigyi, Ph.D., M.D., a Harriet Van Vleet Endowment professor of basic oncology research at UTHSC
- Junming Yue, Ph.D., an associate professor of pathology at UTHSC
- Sue Chin Lee, Ph.D., an associate professor of physiology at UTHSC
- David Schwartz, M.D., chair of the Department of Radiation Oncology at UTHSC
- Sandra Davern, Ph.D., section head for radioisotope research and development at ORNL
- Rachel Patton McCord, Ph.D., an associate professor of biochemistry and cellular and molecular biology at UT Knoxville
“We are thrilled to continue to work together with Drs. Davern and McCord and their research team across the system on this initiative,” Tigyi said in the release.
The Drug Discovery and Development initiative (D3) at UTHSC, also researching new radiopharmaceutical cancer therapies, paved the way for the new research project.
The $20 million in funding for the initiative is set to be paid out over the next five years.
