Dr. Valerie Weaver Receives NCI Outstanding Investigator Award (OIA) and $6.7M R35 Grant

Valerie Weaver, Ph.D., Professor of Surgery in the Departments of Surgery, Anatomy, and Bioengineering & Therapeutics Sciences, and Director of the Center for Bioengineering & Tissue Regeneration, is the recipient of a National Cancer Institute (NCI) Outstanding Investigator Award (OIA) (R35), supporting a 7-year $6.7M grant for Dr. Weaver's project entitled, “Tissue mechanics reprograms the tissue to malignancy and metastasis.”

This NCI Outstanding Investigator Award provides long-term support to experienced investigators with outstanding records of research productivity and encourages investigators to embark on long-term projects of unusual potential.

Grant Summary and Significance

Despite encouraging breakthroughs that have improved the five-year survival of cancer patients, the long-term prognosis for those with metastatic disease remains dismal. Patient mortality is due primarily to metastatic disease that is resistant to treatment and evades anti-tumor immunity. In this proposal, we seek to identify conserved mechanical reinforcement circuits that drive malignant transformation and progression focusing on inflammation and mitochondrial stress. Completion of the program should provide new insight into how inflammation and the extracellular matrix drive malignancy and foster the evolution of aggressive cancers, clarify how cancers circumvent critical bottlenecks they encounter during tumor progression and identify biomarkers to risk stratify patients and therapies to treat refractory tumors and for chemoprevention. (Source: NIH RePORTER)

View Full Abstract at NIH RePORTER

NCI Outstanding Investigator Award Recipients (NCI Website)