OBERLIN – An assistant professor of chemistry at Oberlin College has received a $345,000 grant from the National Cancer Institute to assist her and her team in searching for clues to detect deadly ovarian cancer.
The grant to Dr. Rebecca Jean Whelan and her team was announced by U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur, D-Toledo.
“We’re all rooting for Dr. Whelan and her team at Oberlin,” Kaptur said. “Ovarian cancer is the fifth most common cancer among women in the United States and claims approximately 15,000 lives each year.”
Whelan will oversee a three-year research project titled “Development of Aptamer-Based Detection and Therapy Strategies for Ovarian Cancer.”
Aptamers are molecules that bind to a specific target molecule and help facilitate research.
“The research that I’m engaged in now is invested in finding new ways of detecting ovarian cancer by looking at blood samples and searching within those blood samples for telltale indicators that the disease is present, even if it’s at a very early stage,” she said in a video posted on the Oberlin College website.
In an email Friday, Whelan said the research project is motivated by the need to develop reliable noninvasive tests for early stage ovarian cancer, since treatment is most effective when the disease is diagnosed early. Tests for biomarkers found in the blood of women with ovarian cancer are widely used by physicians, according to Whelan.
“Our goal is to develop new ways of measuring the amounts of three important cancer biomarkers,” Whelan wrote. “We also seek to develop new methods for looking at the surfaces of tumors and selectively killing cancer cells.”
Whelan’s funding comes from the Academic Research Enhancement Awards program that is administered by the NCI.
The NCI is part of the National Institutes of Health, which is one of 11 agencies that compose the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The NCI was established under the National Cancer Institute Act of 1937 and is the federal government’s principal agency for cancer research and training.
