New grant to support an exciting bowel cancer project

Congratulations to Dr Lesley Stark who has recently been awarded a grant from Bowel & Cancer Research - a UK based charity that funds research to investigate new ideas in the area of bowel disease: March 2017

Congratulations to Dr Lesley Stark who has recently been awarded a grant from Bowel & Cancer Research - a UK based charity that funds research to investigate new ideas in the area of bowel disease. The grant will support a project entitled “Exploration of COMMD1 as a prognostic marker and therapeutic target”.

Recent research from the Stark laboratory suggests that COMMD1 (one of the proteins present in colon cancer cells) may be useful for identifying bowel cancer patients with a poorer prognosis, and those that would benefit from therapy with aspirin. In addition, Dr Stark’s collaborators from the Centro de Ingeniería Genética y Biotecnología (CIGB) in Cuba have identified a new drug called CIGB-552 that targets this protein and that has potent activity against bowel cancer cells. Based on these initial discoveries, the project aims to explore the hypothesis that COMMD1 contributes to colorectal cancer progression. The research will help to validate COMMD1 as potential target for colon cancer therapy. It will also provide important data that might help to progress CIGB-552 into clinical trials.    

Links

Dr Lesley Stark: http://www.ed.ac.uk/cancer-centre/research/stark-group

Bowel & Cancer Research:  http://www.bowelcancerresearch.org/  

Centro de Ingeniería Genética y Biotecnología (CIGB): http://www.cigb.edu.cu/index.php/en/