Texas A&M Health receives more than $5.7 million from CPRIT in fight against cancer

The Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) has awarded three grants totaling $5.75 million to Texas A&M University Health Science Center (Texas A&M Health). The grants are among 62 new statewide awards totaling more than $114 million that CPRIT recently announced in Austin.

“Texas A&M is proud to recognize the outstanding faculty-researchers who have, along with their talented research teams, secured these vital and prestigious grants from CPRIT,” said Mark A. Barteau, vice president for research at Texas A&M. “With CPRIT’s support, we will continue to advance cancer treatment and prevention across our state and around the globe.”

Peter Davies, MD, PhD, professor at the College of Medicine, and director of the Center for Translational Cancer Research at the Texas A&M Health Institute of Biosciences and Technology, received the largest of the three grants, a $3.9 million Core Facility Support Award for his project “The Combinatorial Drug Discovery Program (CDDP).”

Anna Lichorad, MD, clinical assistant professor in the Family Medical Residency and Department of Primary Care Medicine & Population Health at the College of Medicine, and a researcher with Texas A&M Health, received a $1.6 million Prevention Grant for her project “Expansion of Texas A&M’s Cancer Prevention Program to Rural and Medically Underserved Women.”

In addition, CPRIT presented a High Impact High Risk Award of $250,000 to Robert Yu-Lin Tsai, MD, PhD, associate professor in the Center for Translational Cancer Research at the Institute of Biosciences and Technology, for his project titled “Genome-Wide DNA Methylation Markers for Predicting the Risk of Liver Cancer in Non-Alcoholic Fatty Livers.”

To date, CPRIT has awarded $2.6 billion in grants to Texas research institutions and organizations through its academic research, prevention and product development research programs. CPRIT has recruited 213 distinguished researchers; supported the establishment, expansion or relocation of 42 companies to Texas; and generated more than $5 billion in additional public and private investments. CPRIT funding has advanced scientific and clinical knowledge and provided 6.6 million life-saving cancer prevention and early detection services reaching Texans from all 254 counties. On Nov. 5, 2019, Texas voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment to provide an additional $3 billion to CPRIT for a total $6 billion investment in cancer research and prevention.

Story adapted from an article that originally appeared on Texas A&M Today