The collaborative University of Illinois Cancer Center and UICentre Drug Discovery Program, also known as U2D2, awarded its second round of seed grants aimed at the development of promising new anti-cancer therapeutics.
This latest round of $25,000 seed grants was directed to prostate cancer. Principal Investigators (PIs) for these grants are required to be Cancer Center members. The recent awardees and their research projects are:
- The team of PI Donald Vander Griend, PhD, the Cancer Center Associate Director for Shared Resources and an Assistant Professor of Pathology, and Co-Investigator Malaika Argade, PhD, a UICentre Research Scientist, to optimize IGF1R inhibitors to re-sensitize prostate cancer cells to anti-androgen therapy.
- Jeremy Johnson, PharmD, PhD, a Professor of Pharmacy Practice, to identify allosteric inhibitors of a chaperone protein of the androgen receptor. Such compounds could form the basis of a new therapy for prostate cancer.
Both Vander Griend and Johnson are part of the Cancer Center’s Translational Oncology Research Program. UICentre is the campuswide drug discovery enterprise at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC).