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16 June 2022

IARC scientists part of team awarded Cancer Grand Challenges grant to study known and novel cancer risk factors at the molecular level

The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) is pleased to announce that researchers from IARC and partner institutions are part of a team that has been awarded a grant of up to US$25 million over 5 years as part of the Cancer Grand Challenges initiative, which is coordinated by Cancer Research UK and the United States National Cancer Institute (NCI).*

The funded project, “PROMINENT: Discovering the molecular signatures of cancer PROMotion to INform prevENTion”, is co-led by Dr Paul Brennan, Head of the Genomic Epidemiology Branch at IARC, Dr Núria López-Bigas from the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB, Barcelona, Spain), and Dr Allan Balmain from the University of California San Francisco (UCSF, USA). The project is a response to the challenge “Understand how cells and tissues maintain ‘normal’ phenotypes whilst harbouring oncogenic mutations and how they transition to become a tumour”.

PROMINENT will bring together a multidisciplinary team of investigators who will use cutting-edge high-throughput genomic, proteomic, and functional methods to explore the role of known and novel risk factors in the promotion of tumour development, and to understand the precise mechanisms by which these promoting factors stimulate the conversion of normal cells to cancer cells.

PROMINENT will facilitate the identification of the causative lifestyle and environmental factors that promote cancer, based on a deeper understanding of the process of initiated cell selection by tumour-promoting agents, and will provide routes to new methods and global approaches to cancer prevention for the wide population, including those most at risk.

PROMINENT is co-funded by Cancer Research UK, the NCI, and the Asociación Española Contra el Cáncer (Spanish Association Against Cancer).

*The NCI is part of the National Institutes of Health.

Visit the Cancer Grand Challenges website

Find out more about the new teams funded by Cancer Grand Challenges

Find out more about PROMINENT

Publication status

Published in section: IARC News

Publication date: 16 June, 2022, 0:01

Direct link: https://www.iarc.who.int/news-events/iarc-scientists-part-of-team-awarded-cancer-grand-challenges-grant-to-study-known-and-novel-cancer-risk-factors-at-the-molecular-level/

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