Wei Li, PhD, a researcher at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center (UTHSC), has received a $1.91 million grant to study new ways to weaken cancer cells by targeting one of their components called survivin. The grant from the National Institutes of Health will be distributed over five years.
Li is a professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences in the College of Pharmacy. The project is titled, “Selective Targeting Survivin for Cancer Therapy.”
Central to Li’s work is apoptosis. This is the process by which most cells stop growing after they reach a certain point, and eventually die off. Without apoptosis, cells would grow too large and encroach on surrounding cells, which is what cancer cells do. Cancer cells “hijack the process,” Li said.
Li and his team –Muxiang Zhou at Emory University and Duane Miller, Bernd Meibohm, David Hamilton at UTHSC – hope to make a compound that could degrade survivin in cancer cells, making them more susceptible to anti-cancer therapies, and further determine the exact mechanisms of action for these compounds