Mark Foundation commits $2 million to 2022 ASPIRE Award recipients
The Mark Foundation for Cancer Research in New York City has announced the eight winners of its 2022 ASPIRE Awards, who will receive grants totaling $2 million.
Established in 2018, the program enables innovative approaches to solving high-impact problems in cancer research that tend to fall outside the scope of other funding opportunities and supporting high-risk, high-reward projects in an accelerated time frame, typically one year.
Recipients include Hans Clevers (Hubrecht Institute, Netherlands), “Modeling HBV-associated liver cancer with hepatocyte organoids”; Sarah-Jane Dawson (University of Melbourne, Australia), “Circulating tumor DNA to serially assess in vivo transcriptional evolution in cancers”; Andreas Hottinger (Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois, Switzerland) and Douglas Hanahan (Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Switzerland), “A proof-of-concept clinical trial of an innovative new therapy for glioblastoma”; Johanna Joyce (University of Lausanne and Ludwig Institute, Switzerland), “Investigating the bacterial microbiome in brain metastasis”; Xiongbin Lu (Indiana University School of Medicine and Indiana University Melvin and Bren Simon Comprehensive Cancer Center) “Reprograming Regulatory T Cells for Cancer Immunotherapy”; Trudy Oliver and Baldomero Olivera (Huntsman Cancer Institute), “Targeting small cell lung cancer plasticity with constellation pharmacology”; Mikko Taipale (Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research, Canada), Daniel Durocher, and Frank Sicheri (Mount Sinai Hospital, Canada), “Development of a genetic platform for induced proximity therapeutics”; and Georg Winter (Research Center for Molecular Medicine, Austria) and Steve Gygi (Harvard Medical School), “Hijacking immune-cell specific E3 ligases for targeted protein degradation.”
“These ASPIRE grants will enable innovative approaches to solving challenges in multiple cancer types including small cell lung cancer, breast cancer, and glioblastoma. The projects are at the forefront of diverse research areas such as chemical biology, cancer evolution, and cellular plasticity,” said Mark Foundation CEO Ryan Schoenfeld. “We continue to increase our financial commitment globally to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery and the development of new cancer therapies.”
(Photo credit: Getty Images/Motortion)
