Penn Medicine and The Wistar Institute have been awarded a prestigious $11.7 million Specialized Programs of Research Excellence, or SPORE, grant from the National Cancer Institute. The five-year award will fund three new melanoma research projects that translate fundamental laboratory discoveries made in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and The Wistar Institute into new therapeutics to treat skins cancers.
The grant also includes a career enhancement program focused on training and retaining underrepresented minorities in skin cancer research, and a pilot award program that will expand research into non-melanoma skin cancer.
The SPORE team at Penn and Wistar will carry on a long tradition of developing new treatments for skin cancer with the grant, which follows a previous SPORE grant awarded to the institutions in 2014. With extensive support from the Abramson Cancer Center (ACC) and the Tara Miller Melanoma Research Center, the team developed new expertise and resources, including a tissue specimen core with more than 11,000 banked specimens, that helped secure the new SPORE grant.
Ravi K. Amaravadi, MD, an associate professor of Hematology-Oncology in Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine and the co-leader of the Cancer Therapeutics Program in the ACC, and Meenhard Herlyn, DVM, DSc, director of Wistar’s Melanoma Research Center and professor in the Molecular & Cellular Oncogenesis Program in Wistar’s Cancer Center, will serve as the co-directors of the SPORE.
“Our longstanding team approach to science and new therapies has been recognized by the NCI once again with this new SPORE grant. We can now expand on this collaboration—which has already led to important developments in melanoma,” Amaravadi said. “From new fundamental insights about how skin cancer escapes treatments to new treatment options for patients, these projects—and the people leading them—are at the cutting edge of translational medicine, and are entirely focused on improving the health of our patients.”
“Despite dramatic improvement brought about by immunotherapy, we still have major challenges for the majority of patients and new approaches are urgently needed,” Herlyn said. “Building on major breakthroughs by our team, we are poised to address crucial unanswered questions to improve immunotherapy response and identify new biomarkers to inform patient management and reduce therapy toxicity.”
Melanoma is the deadliest form of skin cancer and the fifth deadliest form of cancer, overall. According to NCI statistics, more than 100,000 new cases of melanoma will occur in 2021 in the U.S. alone. The incidence of melanoma and other skin cancers, such as Merkel cell carcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma, are rising both nationally and regionally. If caught early, skin cancer is considered treatable; however, when these cancers metastasize, they are especially deadly.
Source: University of Pennsylvania