NCI Grant Helps Researcher Continue Work on Pancreatic Cancer

CINCINNATI—Seed funding from community organizations has helped a University of Cincinnati researcher secure federal support to continue his studies of a novel therapeutic target for certain pancreatic cancer patients.

The five-year, nearly $1.4M R01 grant awarded by the National Cancer Institute to a team led by Vladimir Bogdanov, PhD, assistant professor and director of the Hemostasis Research Program in the Division of Hematology Oncology, Department of Internal Medicine, at the UC College of Medicine, will be used for science focused on a novel form of Tissue Factor, the protein that starts the process of blood clotting.

Bogdanov, who was recruited to UC from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in 2009, is a member at the UC Cancer Institute and the Cincinnati Cancer Center and closely collaborates with several high-profile laboratories in the U.S. and abroad, most notably groups at Leiden University in the Netherlands, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of Tromso in Norway.

"Pancreatic cancer is the fourth-leading cause of cancer-associated death, and pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), the most common type of pancreatic cancer that involves the tumor building a protective barrier around itself which makes it harder to treat, accounts for over 80 percent of all forms of pancreatic cancer,” Bogdanov says. "Alternatively-spliced Tissue Factor—termed asTF—is a protein that promotes formation of functional vascular networks, and tumor cells hijack this mechanism to fuel their own growth and spread. 

"Unlike its major form, termed full-length Tissue Factor, asTF is not needed to stop bleeding upon tissue injury, and targeting asTF does not carry the risk of bleeding complications. Using this funding, we hope to study the effects of inhibiting asTF on primary tumor growth and metastatic progression in PDAC, with hopes of using our findings to create novel therapeutic approaches to pancreatic cancer and possibly other forms of cancer in which asTF is present at high levels, for example breast cancer.”

Bogdanov says he received seed money from the local organizations GIVEHOPE and BSI Engineering in 2012 and 2014, which helped him continue work in his laboratory while waiting for the federal funds to be awarded.

"I am incredibly grateful to GIVEHOPE and BSI because their grants allowed me to continue my research on PDAC.”