Brookline resident awarded grant to study pancreatic cancer
The Howard Hughes Medical Institute has awarded a Physician-Scientist Early Career Grant to Brookline resident Dr. Brian Wolpin, a clinician-researcher at Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, who is searching for genes and environmental factors that predispose people to pancreatic cancer.
Wolpin and 10 other researchers in the United State will receive $375,000 over the next five years to help them launch and develop innovative research programs. The grants are made to alumni of two HHMI programs for medical students through a Physician-Scientist Early Career initiative that began in 2006.
“These awards give promising physician-scientists at the start of their faculty careers the time and resources they will need to more fully commit themselves to research,” HHMI President Robert Tjian said. “The support we provide should help them set up their labs and begin making discoveries.”
Wolpin is working to identify genetic and lifestyle factors that predispose people for pancreatic cancer, which kills about 95 percent of those diagnosed with the disease. He is analyzing large amounts of data from epidemiological studies, comparing information about diet, physical activity, blood biomarkers, and inherited genetic information from people with pancreatic cancer to similar data from healthy people. Wolpin has already used this strategy to discover that the gene development for determining blood type may also be involved in the development of nearly 20 percent of pancreatic cancers. He hopes to reveal additional risk factors for pancreatic cancer that could help in identifying high-risk individuals before they develop the disease, and in developing new therapies.
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