Dr. Alla Grishok, Associate Professor of Biochemistry has been awarded a 2021 Shipley Prostate Cancer Research Pilot Grant Award. She will act as coordinator of a multi-center, multi-PI initiative involving Dr. Christopher Heaphy (Department of Medicine), Dr. Joshua Campbell (Department of Medicine), and Dr. Rachel Flynn (Department of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, GSI) across Boston Medical Center (BMC) Pathology department, Shipley Prostate Cancer Research Center, BU-BMC Cancer Center, and Genome Science Institute (GSI) at BUSM.
The goals of this pilot research are: “to (1) identify coding and non-coding genomic alterations that are associated with more aggressive disease in Black men with prostate cancer and to (2) establish a pipeline that will integrate the genomic data with other biomarker measurements, such as the presence of circulating tumor DNA or alterations in the gut microbiome, and with the overall clinical outcomes in a large cohort of men”. The success of this project may lead to better predictions of the severity of the disease in individual men and to informed selection of the appropriate treatment options in the future.