Winship realigns its research programs to increase impact

1/06/2020, The Cancer Letter

Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University has been granted formal approval from NCI to realign the four research programs funded by its NCI Cancer Center Support Grant. The realignment creates a new Cancer Immunology Research Program, which builds on Winship’s growing strengths in cancer immunology and the integration of immunology research ef forts across Emory University. “This realignment will open up more collaborative possibilities for our faculty and focus our ef forts on research that advances cancer discoveries,” said Kimberly F. Kerstann, Winship senior director for research administration. Madhav Dhodapkar, who joined in 2018 as inaugural director of the Winship Center for Cancer Immunology, and Rafi Ahmed, director of the Emory Vaccine Center, will lead this new program. The program will include translational physicians and scientists at Winship as well as from the Emory Vaccine Center and the Department of Immunology and Microbiology. The realignment also creates another entity, the Cell and Molecular Biology Research Program, led by Jing Chen, and Wei Zhou. The research themes for the CMB program are cancer cell metabolism, cancer cell stress and survival, mechanisms of invasion and metastasis, and gene regulation. Members of the former Cancer Cell Biology and Cancer Genetics and Epigenetics programs will migrate to the new CI and CMB programs. The other two Winship research programs will continue under the same names: Discovery and Developmental Therapeutics Research Program, led by Haian Fu, and Taofeek Owonikoko; and the Cancer Prevention and Control Research Program, led by Timothy L. Lash, and Mylin Torres. The benefit to patients will be significant because these research programs go to the core of how scientific discovery advances the prevention, detection, and treatment of cancer.