Dr. Sanku Mallik received official notification today of a Center for Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE) grant of up to $9.62 million. The award from the National Institutes of Health is being used to establish a research center aimed at early diagnosis and treatment of pancreatic cancer.
Sanku Mallik, professor of pharmaceutical sciences, and D.K. Srivastava, a James A. Meier Professor of chemistry and biochemistry, have been awarded a Phase One grant of $2 million. They are using the funds to establish a Center for Diagnostic and Therapeutic Strategies for Pancreatic Cancer—the first disease-specific research center at NDSU.
The center will support the research of three junior investigators, Estelle Leclerc, associate professor of pharmaceutical sciences; Katie Reindl, assistant professor of biological sciences; and Guodong Liu, associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry. It will competitively recruit other researchers interested in complementary areas of pancreatic cancer research.
The team participating in the grant submission includes Sanku Mallik, Estelle Leclerc and Bin Guo in Pharmaceutical Sciences, Dan Cernusca in Pharmacy Practice, Dan Friesner in the College of Health Professions, Katie Reindl in Biological Sciences, and D.K. Srivastava and Guodong Liu in Chemistry and Biochemistry.
The grant will fund two additional junior faculty positions and will support up to 12 graduate students who will conduct fundamental studies on diagnostics, drug delivery and treatment of pancreatic cancer.
“The COBRE grant also will fulfill the NIH’s mission of mentoring junior faculty so they become successful in obtaining independent NIH-funded research grants, as well as expanding the existing research infrastructure at NDSU,” Mallik said.
Researchers at NDSU’s Center will collaborate with colleagues at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, including pancreatic cancer researcher Michael Hollingsworth of the medical center’s Eppley Institute for Research in Cancer and Allied Diseases. NDSU researchers also will have access to the medical center’s pancreatic cancer tissue bank.
The Center will conduct fundamental research with a focus on diagnostic and therapeutic tools for controlling the onset and proliferation of pancreatic cancer. The Phase One COBRE grant is awarded through the NIH’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences. The Center can become eligible for up to two five-year renewals.
The Center for Diagnostic and Therapeutic Strategies in Pancreatic Cancer is supported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under award number 1P20GM109024. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.