Andrea Flores UTRGV – The School of Medicine received a $200 thousand grant from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) for the first time to further advance pancreatic cancer research.
This is a pilot project with an objective to generate preliminary data so the UTRGV South Texas Center of Excellence in Cancer Research can obtain further funding and expand their investigation.
According to Dr. Everardo Cobos, clinical chair for the cancer service line, director for the department of internal medicine and oncologist, pancreatic cancer is not part of the most common cancers, like lung or breast, but is one of the deadliest.
Cobos said one of the dilemmas of this type of cancer is that there is no early detection or treatment, and it silently spreads throughout the body.
“It’s one of those cancers where the need for research is very broad from the beginning of how to detect it to the end when it’s very advanced, to how to treat it,” he said.
Dr. Bilal Bin Hafeez, principal investigator, assistant professor of the department of medicine and oncology integrated service unit, said one of the things his laboratory is working on is investigating pancreatic cancer biology.
“What is happening in cancer cells, they have the high demand of protein synthesis,” Hafeez said. “And this process is known as ribosome biogenesis. And this process is deregulated in most of the tumor type and we are exploring this area in terms of pancreatic cancer.”
He added that this grant will help transform their bench side research to clinical trials, meaning that they will transfer their laboratory results to animal model testing.
Undergraduate students will have the opportunity to participate in this investigation and get a sense as to whether this would be a career of interest to them.
Georgina Villanueva, biology senior, has been an intern working with Dr. Hafeez since last December and said it is a real-life experience.
“The grant is going to help them it’s really going to allow them to expand their efforts,” Villanueva said. Honestly, I really like being here because every day it’s something new.”
