Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center has received a $9.2 million grant from the National Cancer Institute for research in developing more effective treatments for glioblastoma patients.
The hospital says it will use the five-year grant to develop the next generation of molecularly targeted drugs to directly attack tumor mass and cancer cells in glioblastoma patients, according to an announcement.
This aggressive form of cancer originates in the brain.
“One of the major obstacles to glioblastoma treatment is the accessibility of the tumors to drugs because of the blood-brain and blood-brain tumor barriers,” Dr. Waldemar Debinski, Wake Forest Baptist’s principal investigator of the study and professor of cancer biology, radiation oncology, microbiology and immunology, said in a press release. “In addition, a surgical approach is often hampered by the inability to fully visualize tumor cells that have migrated away from the tumor and remove them surgically without potentially damaging vital areas of the brain.”
Wake Forest Baptist’s team will work with researchers from the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Virginia Tech-Wake Forest School of Biomedical Engineering and Sciences, Columbia University and the University of Texas at Austin to conduct the research.
