New York sources reported that the US National Cancer Institute has give the “Outstanding Investigator Award” to Professor Arul Chinnaiyan, from the University of Michigan, and $6.5 million in funding over seven years, to identify cancer biomarkers to improve diagnosis and develop new targeted therapies. Chinnaiyan, said in a statement “The field of precision oncology continues to evolve with the overarching goal of providing cancer patients with enhanced diagnostic and prognostic capabilities and better treatments”.
He added “This grant will help us identify new biomarkers and understand their biological roles in cancer progression”. Furthermore a pioneer in precision oncology, Chinnaiyan in 2010, launched the Michigan Oncology Sequencing (Mi-ONCOSEQ) program. Accordingly Mi-ONCOSEQ is a research protocol for sequencing the DNA and RNA of metastatic cancers and normal tissue to identify alterations that could help drive treatment.
Moreover the program includes a precision medicine tumor board in which
experts discuss each case. Hence Chinnaiyan’s lab has also analysed the global
landscape of a portion of the genome that has not been previously well explored
long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs). Previously considered as the dark matter, new
evidence suggests that lncRNAs may play a role in cancer and that understanding
them better could lead to new potential targets for improving cancer diagnosis,
prognosis or treatment.
