The University of Vermont (UVM) Cancer Center has announced the first funded project through its American Cancer Society (ACS) Institutional Research Grant (IRG). The ACS IRG, awarded to the UVM Cancer Center earlier this year, is designed to stimulate novel, interdisciplinary and translational cancer research at the UVM Cancer Center. UVM Cancer Center members Jason Stumpff, Ph.D., UVM assistant professor of molecular physiology and biophysics, and Christopher Anker, M.D., UVM assistant professor of radiology and a radiation oncologist at the UVM Medical Center, were competitively awarded funding from the IRG to pursue research on a new therapeutic target for colorectal cancer.

This new study aims to build on research indicating that Kif18A, a protein associated with controlling the movement of the cell’s genetic material during mitosis, may be a potential treatment target for colorectal cancer and may inhibit cancer cell growth. The future goal would be a long-term translational study utilizing these non-essential mitotic regulators as therapeutics to make colon cancer cells more sensitive to radiation therapy.

Stumpff, who joined the UVM faculty in 2011, earned his Ph.D. in molecular, cellular and developmental biology from the University of Colorado. His lab’s goal is to understand the mechanisms that move and organize chromosomes during cell division and to determine how defects in these functions contribute to cancer.

Anker, who recently joined the UVM Division of Radiation Oncology, is co-director of the gastrointestinal (GI) transdisciplinary team at the UVM Cancer Center, which, through a team-approach, aims to integrate research efforts across cancer disciplines. His research and clinical efforts are focused predominately on GI, lung, and skin cancers including melanoma. Anker’s clinical experience led him to recognize a major clinical need for novel therapies that improve outcomes and look at safety and efficacy of treatments combined with radiation.

The pair’s joint project, looking at new therapies for colorectal cancer, could prove to be a working model for the development of novel therapeutics in other cancers.

The UVM Cancer Center has announced a second call for applications for IRG funding, intended for junior investigators (within six years of first independent academic appointment) and recognizing partnerships between either a laboratory or behavioral scientist and a physician investigator, with a deadline of July 20, 2015.  For more information about the ACS IRG at the UVM Cancer Center: http://www.uvm.edu/medicine/vtcancercenter/?Page=awards_acs.html&SM=researchsubmenu.html