In an abstract presented at the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2017, UNC Lineberger’s Liza Makowski, PhD, reported her and her colleagues’ preliminary findings that breast cancer cells grew larger when they were transplanted into fatty, obese tissue.

There are two categories of awards offered this spring for the UNC Lineberger Developmental Funding Award: Pilot Awards of up to $50,000 for one-year projects involving one principal investigator, and Stimulus Awards of up to $100,000 per year for one or two years for projects that enhance our scientific understanding of cancer basic mechanisms or clinical and public health practice.

UNC Lineberger’s Shawn Hingtgen, PhD, and colleagues, in laboratory studies, have converted human skin cells into stem cells that can hunt down and kill human brain cancer, an important step to moving the approach closer to a clinical trial.

Funding will support research to evaluate whether targeting inflammatory monocytes through the use of CCR2 inhibitors will blunt or prevent metastasis in squamous cell lung cancer.

Thanks to the donation of handmade scarves from community groups, UNC Lineberger’s Patient and Family Resource Center staff are helping women to counter some of the side effects of cancer treatments. In addition to receiving a beautiful scarf, the women were taught different ways to wear it.

In the journal Cancer Discovery, UNC Lineberger’s Gary Johnson, PhD, and colleagues published findings on how triple negative breast cancer cells are able to bypass treatment with trametinib, an FDA-approved kinase inhibitor. They also demonstrated in a laboratory model a potential treatment approach that could prevent the onset of resistance.

A team of researchers, including UNC Lineberger’s Norman E. Sharpless, MD, has shown that chemotherapy triggers a pro-inflammatory stress response termed cellular senescence, promoting the adverse effects of chemotherapy as well as cancer relapse and metastasis. Eliminating the senescent cells in mice prevented the side effects and relapse.

Backed by a three-year, more than $1.8 million grant from the National Cancer Institute, UNC Lineberger researchers Ryan Miller, MD, PhD, and Gary Johnson, PhD, plan to develop better cancer models to identify patterns of drug resistance in glioblastoma.

A start-up company co-founded by UNC Lineberger researcher Andrew Wang, MD, has raised $2.9 million to commercialize a test designed to capture cancer cells circulating in the blood.

Scientists led by UNC Lineberger member John Sondek, PhD, created a new biochemical tool to block specific types of downstream G-protein signaling, opening new avenues of research and potential drug design and discovery.