The National Cancer Institute awarded a $240,092 Project Grant (CFDA 93.396 - Cancer Biology Research) to the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, CA. The grant will fund research to implement a new mass spectrometry-based protein footprinting technique called Covalent Protein Painting (CPP) to measure protein conformations and protein-protein interactions in single cancer cells. The goal is to determine whether aberrant protein conformations are observed across all cells or confined to a...
The National Cancer Institute (NCI) awarded a $154,642 Project Grant under the Cancer Research Manpower (CFDA 93.398) program to the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research. The grant, titled "Targeting the Evolving Immunopeptidome of Metastatic Colorectal Cancer," aims to systematically elucidate the evolving immunopeptidome from normal colon, primary tumor, and metastatic lesion patient-derived organoids (PDOs) through mass spectrometry. This will identify conserved...
The National Cancer Institute (NCI) awarded a $238,722 Project Grant under the Cancer Research Manpower (CFDA 93.398) federal grant program to the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research in New York. The grant, awarded on August 18, 2025, will fund research to investigate the role of mutagenic DNA repair mechanisms, such as microhomology-mediated end joining (MMEJ), in driving acquired drug resistance in persister cancer cells. The research aims to define the specific mechanisms by which...
The National Cancer Institute (NCI) awarded Duke University a $387,702 R21 project grant (CFDA 93.396 Cancer Biology Research) to develop an automated bipartite algorithmic pipeline that leverages recent advancements in protein language modeling and co-complex databases to design peptide binders that can induce targeted protein degradation. This "ubiquibody" platform aims to enable the development of protein degraders for intractable cancer targets that are challenging to address...
The National Cancer Institute (NCI) awarded a $100,760 Project Grant under the Cancer Research Manpower (CFDA 93.398) program to the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research in New York, NY. The grant supports research to engineer biomaterials that can modulate the tumor immune microenvironment, with a focus on multiple myeloma. Specifically, the project aims to develop nanoparticle-based RNA interference therapy to inhibit key proteins (cyclophilin A and E-selectin) expressed by bone...
This Project Grant award from the National Cancer Institute (CFDA 93.395 - Cancer Treatment Research) to The Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania is focused on engineering a protein therapeutic to limit the transformation of the patient's own anti-tumor autoantibodies into highly potent T cell-redirecting antibodies, specifically within the tumor microenvironment. The $216,682 award, effective March 1, 2025 through February 28, 2027, aims to optimize the engineered protein therapeutic...
The National Cancer Institute (NCI) awarded a $581,381 Project Grant under the Cancer Cause and Prevention Research program (CFDA 93.393) to the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research. The 5-year grant, effective June 5, 2025, will fund research to investigate the role of microhomology-mediated end-joining (MMEJ) in mitosis and its impact on drug resistance in cancer. The key products of this research will be a better understanding of DNA damage repair pathways and how they contribute...
The National Cancer Institute (NCI) awarded a $406,258 Project Grant (CFDA 93.395 - Cancer Treatment Research) to the Georgia State University Research Foundation Inc. on July 15, 2025. The grant supports research to develop novel covalent anti-cancer drugs using phosphorus fluoride exchange (PFEX) click chemistry. The key objectives are to: 1) synthesize PFEX warheads with different substituents to optimize stability and reactivity, 2) compare PFEX warheads to α,β-unsaturated carbonyl warheads,...
The National Cancer Institute (NCI) awarded a $516,648 Project Grant under the Cancer Research Manpower (CFDA 93.398) program to Rockefeller University. The grant, effective September 18, 2024 through March 31, 2027, supports research to discover and characterize covalent ligands for the oncoprotein CIP2A, which is a unique therapeutic vulnerability in BRCA1/2-deficient cancers. The project aims to: (1) identify potent and selective covalent ligands for CIP2A, (2) develop heterobifunctional...
The National Cancer Institute (NCI), under CFDA 93.396 - Cancer Biology Research, awarded a $449,726 project grant to the University of Illinois to develop tools that enable the rapid analysis of changes in protein interactions within living cells. The project aims to significantly improve the sensitivity and temporal resolution of existing proximity labeling approaches used to map dynamic protein interactomes. Key innovations include engineering biotin ligases that can label proteins with...
The National Cancer Institute (NCI) awarded a $254,638 project grant under the Cancer Research Manpower (CFDA 93.398) program to the University of Pennsylvania. The grant supports the design, synthesis, and biological characterization of macrocyclic collagen mimetic peptides (CMPs) targeted against the cancer-implicated DDR2 kinase. The goal is to develop biochemical tools for modulating the collagen interactome, with a focus on the collagen-DDR2 interaction, which plays a key role in cancer biology. The 21-month project will leverage the university's expertise in organic synthesis, collagen structure and function, receptor tyrosine kinases, crystallography, and cell biology to advance this innovative chemical biology approach. The findings have the potential to yield new discoveries surrounding the role of collagen in cancer and enable future drug discovery applications.