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Soo Park, MD
Soo Park, MD
Posted: Tuesday, July 2, 2024
Noam Auslander, PhD, Assistant Professor in the Molecular and Cellular Oncogenesis Program at the Ellen and Ronald Caplan Cancer Center of The Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, was awarded a $600,000 Women Scientists Innovation Award for Cancer Research grant from the V Foundation for Cancer Research. This grant will support the next 3 years of her research, which will focus on analyzing microbial proteins from the guts of patients with melanoma to determine how they may drive immune responses.
“The V Foundation plays a crucial role in supporting and enabling transformative cancer research,” said Dr. Auslander in an institutional press release. “This prestigious award allows us to use computational biology methods to gain insights from complex data sets that can allow clinically impactful discoveries. Our goal through this project is to determine how patterns in the gut microbiome of melanoma patients determine immunotherapy responses. The V Foundation’s philanthropic support allows us to dig deep into this question using different computational methods and, with the support from our clinician and experimental collaborators, potentially improve future clinical decisions and treatment outcomes.”
“The V Foundation is honored to support Dr. Auslander’s innovative cancer research addressing a major unmet need in predicting responses to melanoma treatment,” said Kara Coleman, PhD, Vice President of Research and Grants Administration at the V Foundation. The V Foundation for Cancer Research was founded in 1993 by the late Jim Valvano, ESPN broadcaster and renowned basketball coach, and it has allocated more than $353 million in grants for cancer research across the country.
“Dr. Auslander’s research identifies valuable patterns in human biology through large-scale data analysis with advanced computational techniques,” said Dario C. Altieri, MD, Wistar President and Chief Executive Officer, Director of the Ellen and Ronald Caplan Cancer Center, and the Robert and Penny Fox Distinguished Professor. “By investing in the burgeoning field of machine learning, this grant from the V Foundation accelerates the use of machine learning in transformative science.”
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