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Dr. Weizhou Zhang receives an Oberley Seed Grant Award from the Holden Comprehensive Cancer Center

April 3, 2017

Weizhou Zhang

Dr. Zhang was awarded an Oberley Seed Grant Award from the Experimental Therapeutics ET Program within Holden Comprehensive Cancer Center. The grant, entitled Targeting mismatch repair in immunotherapy for basal-like breast cancer, will study the role of the mismatch repair pathway in basal-like breast cancer (BLBC), the most aggressive subtype of breast cancer. Among the various DNA repair pathways within cells, Dr. Zhang’s laboratory has found the mismatch repair pathway to be the most upregulated in BLBC and further demonstrated that BLBC cancer cells rely on the mismatch pathway for survival. Since BLBC tumors have few options for targeted therapy, the project aims to develop small molecule inhibitors of mismatch repair pathways to treat this cancer. The total funding for this award is $20,000 and the project period is April 1, 2017 to March 31, 2018.