Newswise — PHILADELPHIA — (Thursday, June 27, 2024) — The Wistar Institute ’s Noam Auslander, Ph.D. , assistant professor in the Molecular and Cellular Oncogenesis Program at the Ellen and Ronald Caplan Cancer Center , was awarded a $600,000 Women Scientists Innovation Award for Cancer Research grant from the V Foundation for Cancer Research to support the next three years of her research, which will use proteins of gut bacteria to predict immunotherapy benefit in melanoma.
Dr. Auslander plans to analyze microbial proteins from the guts of patients to determine how they may drive melanoma immune responses, with the ultimate goal of improving the clinical benefits of immunotherapy. “The V Foundation plays a crucial role in supporting and enabling transformative cancer research,” said Noam Auslander .
“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 for Cancer Research was founded in 1993 by the late Jim Valvano, ESPN broadcaster and renown.
