Baylor, Georgia Tech Teams Collaborating on Protein, Metabolite Markers for Ovarian Cancer

Genomeweb (Jan. 20, 2012)

Scientists from Baylor College of Medicine and the Georgia Institute of Technology have won $900,000 from the Ovarian Cancer Research Fund to investigate the early detection of ovarian cancer. “This grant is a program project development grant, and the idea is to bring together a number of individuals around a common theme,” Martin Matzuk, a BCM professor of pathology and immunology and one of the leaders of the project, told ProteoMonitor. “We were previously funded by OCRF along with a number of investigators to focus on the role of microRNAs in ovarian cancer. That work has gone very well, so we put together another proposal in which we decided to focus on biomarkers, whether they’re protein or small molecule.”

Matzuk is collaborating on the work with his BCM colleague Laising Yen as well as John McDonald, a Georgia Tech researcher and chief research scientist at Atlanta’s Ovarian Cancer Institute. McDonald, who will head up the search for metabolomic biomarkers, leads a research team that published a paper in August 2010 detailing a metabolomic ovarian cancer diagnostic that identified women with ovarian cancer with 100 percent accuracy in a 94-subject trial (PM 8/20/2010). (full story..)