Joon-Ho Sheen receives grant from
U.S. Department of Defense
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (October 27, 2004) — The United
States Department of Defense has awarded a $296,568
grant to Joon-Ho Sheen, a postdoctoral researcher in
the lab of Whitehead Institute Associate Member David
Sabatini.
The three-year grant will fund Sheen’s work in
breast cancer research. Sheen is interested in how a
particular complex of proteins referred to as the mTOR
signaling complex may play a role in tumor growth in
vivo.
Generally, mTOR regulates a cell’s ability to
grow—not to divide, but to literally expand its
mass and increase in size. Researchers believe that
the mTOR complex, when it is working properly, enables
the cell to sense energy and nutrients in its environment.
When the environment is nutrient-rich, the cell will
grow; when there is a dearth of nutrients, the cell
remains in check. In cancers, researchers have found
that although the environment surrounding tumors becomes
gradually deprived of nutrients, they maintain their
ability to grow. Sheen hypothesizes that this may be
due to an alteration in the mTOR signaling pathway,
providing cancer cells a growth advantage over healthy
normal cells. Sheen intends to spend the next three
years using approaches such as engineered animal models
to study nutrient sensitivity in a variety of cancers,
including breast cancer.
The Department of Defense has been funding breast cancer
research for eleven years. According to Katherine Moore,
grants manager for the DoD’s Breast Cancer Research
Program, “The reviewers of this grant felt that
Sheen’s proposal was innovative. It’s a
concept that really hasn’t been investigated by
other researchers.” The purpose of the grant,
she says, is to train young scientists to become breast-cancer
researchers.
In this round of awards, the DoD funded 38 scientists
for breast cancer research, totaling $137,078,858.
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