A Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center-based research program aimed at developing new ways to treat one of the most common and most malignant types of primary brain tumors has been awarded a $1.5 million grant by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) of the National Institutes of Health.
The funding, a five-year renewal of an existing grant, will allow the team led by Waldemar Debinski, M.D., Ph.D., professor of neurosurgery and director of the Brain Tumor Center of Excellence at Wake Forest Baptist, to continue to its work to develop molecular therapeutics for glioblastoma tumors; ways to deliver these drug conjugates to the precise sites where they can best exert their anti-tumor action; and imaging techniques to monitor both tumor progression and response to therapy.
“Our goal is to make therapy more efficacious and safer. We also want to know precisely who among patients responds to therapy,” Debinski said. “These are critical issues in treating cancer patients”
The research team includes Wake Forest Baptist faculty members in cancer biology, hematology and oncology, microbiology and immunology, biochemistry, biostatistics and neuropathology and a medicinal chemistry expert from the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.
The project was initiated by Debinski in 1998 and has been funded by the NCI since then.
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Mac Ingraham: mingraha@wakehealth.edu, 336-716-3487