Dian Yang Awarded NIH High-Risk, High-Reward Grant
Dr. Dian Yang, an Assistant Professor of Molecular Pharmacology and Therapeutics, has been awarded the New Innovator Award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). This award is part of the NIH's esteemed High-Risk High-Reward program, which aims to support unconventional approaches to major challenges in biomedical and behavioral research.
Project Overview
Cancer metastasis causes 8 million deaths each year around the world, but the process by which cancer spreads is still largely hidden.
Several features of metastasis have posed significant challenges to researchers: metastasis can be driven by random and rare events that can unfold over years, and its progression across different locations in the body, along with varying microenvironments, can induce further changes in cancer cells.
Deciphering the dynamics, spatial context, and molecular nature of each step during metastasis is critical to understanding this lethal phase of tumor evolution and developing effective therapeutic strategies.
To overcome these challenges, Dian Yang, an expert in developing molecular recording technologies to capture cell lineage history, will develop cutting-edge technologies to trace the entire course of metastasis in small cell lung cancer, one of the most metastatic and lethal types of cancer.
The effort should generate a blueprint of metastatic progression of small cell lung cancer, offering insights for future therapeutic development. More broadly, this work may create a template for studying the progression of other cancer types, enabling a holistic understanding of tumor evolution.
