Research Grants

Grants Updates

Paolo Abada, MD

2011 Grant Recipient
Research Title: Sec61 and platinum drug resistance

"Over the last year after completing my clinical fellowship program, I have continued my work in the lab on platinum chemotherapy research. In addition to the research, I have also maintained an active clinic at the San Diego VA hospital and successfully passed my hematology and oncology boards this last December.

I currently continue to pursue research on the use of platinum chemotherapy in cancer, and more recently have begun to shift my research towards understanding the basis of platinum drug sensitivity in testicular cancers which is one of the only metastatic cancers that can be cured with chemotherapy alone. This is an observation that has long been a question in the field of cancer, and the NCI has posed this phenomenon as one of their "Provocative Questions" in the last year. I have some interesting preliminary data, and hope to be able to pursue this, funding permitting."

Dinesh S Rao, MD, PhD

2011 Grant Recipient
Research Title: The role of lincRNAs in B-lymphoblastic leukemia pathogenesis and diagnosis

"As a new assistant professor at UCLA, receiving the grant from the Tower Cancer Research Foundation has allowed me to pursue a very interesting new direction in my research. I have been able to recruit a talented post-doctoral fellow and a research technician to help me work on this project. As a consequence of success attracting some external funding and publishing, I recently received a promotion to the next "step" in the UCLA faculty ladder system. In addition, we have been given additional space within the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center to further our work."

Andre Scott Jung, MD

2010 Grant Recipient
Research Title: Thrombopoietin's stabilization of Tnesin2, a protein with migrational implications

"With the Tower Cancer Research Foundation grant I was able to complete my project and we were able to publish our findings in the journal Cell Cycle. Since the completion of my research, I have had the opportunity to join the faculty at University of California, Irvine where my research has shifted to hepatobiliary cancers."

Nu Lu, MD

2010 Grant Recipient
Research Title: Quercetin: A new hepatocellular carcinoma prevention paradigm

"The Tower grant has been instrumental in helping me get started with several research projects at UCLA. For our Phase I Clinical Trial on Quercetin: A New Hepatocellular Carcinoma Prevention Paradigm, we have recruited about one third of our target number of patients. All are tolerating Quercetin extremely well...

It's so important to get the message out there that the Tower Research Foundation's funding has been invaluable in helping my career development. It has enabled me to apply for other grants which have really really helped with keeping my work going."

Arun Singh, MD

2010 Grant Recipient
Research Title: Novel immunotherapies against chemotherapy refractory ovarian cancer

"This grant was an important support for the research that I conducted as a fellow at UCLA as it supported important studies regarding a new imaging probe that we hope can one day help to image-stratify treatment for cancers. This work was presented in abstract form in San Diego at the World Molecular Imaging Conference.

Since I've finished my fellowship, I have now transitioned to a faculty position at UCLA where my clinical focus is treating patients with sarcomas and research focus is on conducting pre-clinical studies to evaluate and to develop novel therapies for specific sarcoma subtypes. I am also part of a team that conducts clinical trials for sarcoma patients and I'm also the Principal Investigator on a soon-to-open immunotherapy trial targeting sarcomas, melanomas and ovarian cancer."

Edward Garon, MD

2008 Grant Recipient
Research Title: Correlation of Pancreatic Adenocarcinoma Molecular Profile with Response to Therapeutics

"I appreciate the support that I received from the Tower Cancer Research Foundation. I have continued to actively pursue cancer research as my career. I am now the director of thoracic oncology at UCLA. I have published numerous laboratory-based and clinical-trials-based papers in the field of cancer research. I was able to use funding from this award to help generate preliminary data that was helpful in obtaining a large grant from the National Cancer Institute to assist me further in my career development. I continue to use the laboratory to develop ideas that generate clinical trials. I then conduct clinical trials in which the patients receive new drugs, and I use the laboratory to analyze the specimens obtained during the clinical trial to correlate responses with patient-specific factors."

Richard Schwab, MD

2007 Grant Recipient
Research Title: Anti-Neu5c Antibodies for Breast Cancer Detection

"The work partially funded by TCRF has now published. We have submitted a second large NCI (National Cancer Institute) grant based on this work and have received a fundable score. We are hopeful that we will receive an additional $2.7 million, 5-year grant to continue moving this work towards clinical practice.

We also have a paper under review at the Journal of Biologic Chemistry titled 'Cross-comparison of protein recognition of sialic acid diversity on two novel sialoglycan microarrays.' It is quite technical, but will inform other scientists about the technique we have used to discover new potential blood tests for early detection of cancer."