PHILADELPHIA (January 6, 2020) – Fox Chase Cancer Center has announced the results of this year’s Pilot Project competition, which is supported in large part by the generosity of donors attending the center’s signature fundraising event, In Vino Vita. Supplemental funding was provided by Fox Chase’s National Cancer Institute Cancer Center Support Grant (CCSG). The award is effective from January 1, 2020 through December 31, 2021.
The goal of the Pilot Project competition was to identify and support team-based translational projects with high potential to lead to grants with multiple principal investigators such as Specialized Programs of Research Excellence (SPORE) grants or Program Project Grants (PPG).
Proposed studies of particular interest were those that addressed cutting-edge issues in organ-based diseases such as lung or gastrointestinal/pancreas cancers or focused on high-priority oncogenic pathways such as RAS or BRCA.
This year, two pilot projects were awarded to center faculty members. The awardees are:
- Margie Clapper, PhD, Joseph Treat, MD, and Andrew Andrews, PhD, for their proposal, “Oncogenic Properties of Estrogen Metabolites in Never-Smokers with Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer.”
- Joan Font-Burgada, PhD, and Hossein Borghaei, DO, MS, for their proposal, “Investigating Neoantigen-Specific Memory T-Cells to Develop Highly Efficient Anticancer Therapies.”
The competition was open to Fox Chase and Temple University researchers who have a formal appointment to one of the CCSG research programs.