Grants at a glance
The National Cancer Institute awarded a five-year grant totaling more than $1.7 million to Yun Yen, M.D., Ph.D., the Dr. & Mrs. Allen Y. Chao Chair in Developmental Cancer Therapeutics and chief of the Division of Clinical and Molecular Pharmacology in City of Hope’s Department of Medical Oncology & Therapeutics Research. Yen is recognized for his research into the drug target ribonucleotide reductase (RR), an enzyme that is important to DNA synthesis and plays a role in some cancers. He seeks to develop a new class of RR inhibitors that are more effective than existing therapies and can offer an option to hydroxyurea, currently the only approved drug that targets RR-based cancers.
The National Institute of General Medical Sciences, a branch of the National Institutes of Health, presented a five-year grant of nearly $1.7 million to Yuan Chen, Ph.D., professor in the Department of Immunology. The grant will enable Chen to investigate the role of small ubiquitin-like modifier (SUMO) and DNA damage responses in cancer therapy. Scientists have shown that the SUMO family of proteins is important to how cells respond to DNA damage.
The Ibrahim El-Hefni Technical Training Foundation gave $300,000 to City of Hope to support two projects. The two-year, $150,000 grants were awarded to Wendong Huang, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Division of Gene Regulation and Drug Discovery, and Fouad R. Kandeel, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Division of Diabetes, Endocrinology & Metabolism. Huang’s grant supports liver research and Kandeel’s supports a pilot program to bring an Egyptian-educated physician to City of Hope for a two-year traineeship in diabetes care and research.
The American Society of Hematology awarded a three-year, $150,000 Junior Scholar Faculty Award to Takahiro (“Taka”) Maeda, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor in the Division of Hematopoietic Stem Cell and Leukemia Research. Maeda’s research focuses on how a protein known as leukemia/lymphoma related factor (LRF) promotes blood cancer. His studies will determine precisely how LRF protein regulates normal B cell development, making it possible to develop drugs to turn off overactive LRF in human lymphomas.