St. Louis-based Washington University School of Medicine received a $5.3 million grant June 28 from the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health for lung cancer recurrence research efforts.
Researchers intend to use the funds for a national study that aims to identify patients with early-stage lung cancer who are at high risk of having the cancer return, even after treatment appears to have eliminated tumors.
"We don't have a test that we can do right after surgery to analyze the tumor and predict how the cancer will behave in the future, even in early-stage lung cancer," said Ramaswamy Govindan, MD, principal investigator and the Anheuser Busch Endowed Chair in Medical Oncology at Washington University.
"This ability to predict recurrence will become even more important as our lung cancer screening programs increase and our imaging technology improves, because we will diagnose more stage 1 disease. We want to see if we can identify molecules in the tumor — DNA, RNA or proteins, for example — that, when present, predict which tumors will recur and which won't," Dr. Govindan said in a university news release.