Ludwig Princeton Associate Director Eileen White was selected as a team leader for a $25 million Cancer Grand Challenges award to tackle cachexia, a debilitating wasting condition associated with advanced cancers. Though it contributes heavily to cancer mortality, cachexia is poorly understood and essentially untreatable. Eileen will, in partnership with Weill Cornell Medicine’s Marcus DaSilva Goncalves and Tobias Janowitz of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, lead a network of scientists based in the U.S. and U.K. known as the CANCAN (Cancer Cachexia Action Network) team. One of four teams selected in the latest round of Cancer Grand Challenges awards, the CANCAN team will explore the biological mechanisms of cachexia and identify potential therapies for its treatment. It will seek to build a “virtual cancer institute” dedicated to tackling the disorder, drawing together clinicians, advocates and scientists with expertise in cancer, metabolism, immunology and other biomedical fields at 14 institutions in the U.S. and U.K. Another team that includes Ludwig Stanford investigators Howard Chang and Michelle Monje and is led by Stanford professor Paul Mischel will investigate the generation of extrachromosomal DNA and its contributions to cancer evolution and drug resistance. You can learn more about the Cancer Grand Challenges and the award-winning teams in this Cancer Research UK article and this news release issued by the National Cancer Institute.
This article appeared in the September 2022 issue of Ludwig Link. Click here to download a PDF (1 MB).