Vanderbilt Ingram Cancer Center

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Michael Savona, MD, professor of Medicine and Cancer Biology, and director of Hematology Research at Vanderbilt- Ingram Cancer Center, has received a competitive grant award from the Edward P. Evans Foundation.

The Discovery Research Grant (DRG) will support his work to develop therapies for patients with myelodysplastic syndromes, a group of cancers that occur when immature blood cells in the bone marrow don’t fully develop or fail to become healthy blood cells.

The study will test the drug ifetroban in patients who have completed cancer treatment for one of five cancer types and have no evidence of disease, but who are at very high risk for cancer recurrence.

An international team involving Vanderbilt researchers has discovered that a new “checkpoint” protein on immune system cells is active in tumors, and that blocking it — in combination with other treatments — is a successful therapeutic approach in mouse models of cancer.

A team of Vanderbilt researchers mapped out the genomic landscape of a metastatic malignant proliferating tricholemmal tumor and identified a targeted treatment for this very rare cancer.