Emanuel Petricoin. Creative Services photo
An award-winning George Mason University researcher received a $1 million grant from the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) and the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network to find better treatments for patients with this devastating cancer.
Understudied and underfunded, pancreatic cancer is the fourth leading cause of cancer death in the United States and has the lowest survival rate of major cancers, at just 7 percent, according to the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network.
Emanuel “Chip” Petricoin, co-director of the George Mason’s Center for Applied Proteomics and Molecular Medicine, will work with researchers from Thomas Jefferson and Georgetown universities.
Petricoin and Lance Liotta have pioneered proteomic research, or the study of proteins. Researchers are using technology developed by Petricoin and Liotta to pinpoint treatments, develop better diagnostic tools and discover insights into disease.
“I am very excited to have the opportunity to use the novel, cutting-edge proteomic tools we developed in our center for trying to help patients with such a horrible disease,” Petricoin says. “Being able to deliver more precise therapies to pancreatic cancer patients is of critical importance. Our approach goes beyond genomics-alone-based medicine to the next frontier of systems medicine where protein analysis, genomic analysis and computational biology converge.”