June 27, 2017 BySTEVE FREKER MEDFORD The Medford Public Schools and a local organization that is one of the oldest historical associations in the region are among six locally-based recipients of $100,000 grants from the Cummings Foundation. School Superintendent Roy Belson accepted the school grants. Cummings awarded $100,000 to the Royall House Association, a historical group that maintains the 400-plus-year-old Isaac Royall House and Slave Quarters on George Street in South Medford. Other Medford grant recipients are the Medford-based Boston Shakespeare Project; Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine; Solutions for Living and Tufts College Bioinformatics. Medford Public Schools will use its $100,000 to provide instructional resources, activities, coordination, and training to support its mission of developing responsible global citizens. Royall House Association will supplement its mostly volunteer workforce with short-term paid expertise in preservation, youth education, collections management, and diversity. Tufts College Bioinformatics will use its money to support Tufts summer bioinformatics course and to bring science fair and classroom projects to low-income students from local urban communities. Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine @ Tufts University will devote its grant to support the creation of a multi-purpose teaching and simulation lab to enhance clinical skills teaching and hands-on learning. The Boston … Continue reading →

The Office of Cancer Clinical Proteomics Research announced today its multi-institutional program to further the convergence of proteomics with genomics, or proteogenomics, to better understand the molecular basis of cancer and accelerate research in these areas by spreading research resources within the scientific community. Among these participating Proteogenomic Translational Research Centers (PTRCs) is the Lester and Sue Smith Breast Center, part of the NCI-designated Dan L Duncan Comprehensive Cancer Center at Baylor College of Medicine, the only site executing these tasks in the South. Bringing centers together under CPTAC The announcement of the PTRCs builds on the recently launched Proteome Characterization Centers (PCCs) and Proteogenomic Data Analysis Centers (PGDACs), which comprehensively characterize biospecimens and integrate/analyze resulting proteogenomic data to extrapolate cancer knowledge. Baylor also has been awarded as a PGDAC site. These three variations of proteogenomic centers of excellence (PCCs, PGDACs, and PTRCs) form the interdisciplinary pillars of the NCIs Clinical Proteomic Tumor Analysis Consortium (CPTAC), which centers on using the analysis of genomic and proteomic data to eventually help solve clinically relevant cancer questions, such as drug response and drug sensitivity. This is an emerging method of collaboration, said Dr. Bing Zhang, professor in the Lester and Sue Smith … Continue reading →

June 27, 2017 For more information, contact: Nicole Fawcett, nfawcett@umich.edu 734-764-2220 For immediate release Grant establishes proteogenomics center at U-M Combining study of protein and genes will help researchers understand molecular basis of cancer Newswise ANN ARBOR, Michigan Researchers at the University of Michigan will lead one of five nationally funded centers dedicated to accelerating research into understanding the molecular basis of cancer and sharing resources with the scientific community. U-M researchers received a grant from the National Cancer Institute to establish a Proteogenomic Data Analysis Center. The center will comprehensively characterize cancer tumor samples to integrate and analyze proteogenomic data to improve researchers ability to develop more targeted cancer therapies. Proteogenomics reflects proteomics the study of proteins with an understanding of genomics. The investment in proteomics on the part of NCI through this consortium shows importance of proteomics and proteogenomics research, says principal investigator Alexey I. Nesvizhskii, Ph.D., associate professor of pathology and of computational medicine and bioinformatics at the University of Michigan. Proteomics provides complementary information not apparent from the analysis of genomic and transcriptomic data alone. U-M is uniquely positioned to implement advanced bioinformatics infrastructure to address these challenges, he adds. The program intends to leverage recent … Continue reading →

CLEMSON, South Carolina Yunhui Peng, a doctoral student in Clemson UniversityCollege of Sciences department of physics and astronomy, receiveda 2017 Chateaubriand Fellowship fromthe Embassy of France in the United States. Starting in fall 2017, Peng will travel to Paris Diderot University for a nine-month fellowship to advance his studies of disease-causing mutations. Peng, who originally is from Ankang, a city in the Shaanxi Province in China, is a fourth-year doctoral student in professor Emil Alexovs Computational Biophysics and Bioinformatics lab. Alexov and his lab members focus their research on the computational modeling of biological macromolecules, such as lipids, nucleic acids and proteins. They also maintain the software for a scientific application called DelPhi, which calculates the electrostatic potential of these macromolecules. The study of disease-causing mutations is a specific interest for those in the Alexov lab. Yunhui Peng is a fourth-year doctoral student in professor Emil Alexovs Computational Biophysics and Bioinformatics lab. Image Credit: Yunhui Peng The project in France actually has a very good connection with my current research analyzing disease-causing mutations of proteins, Peng said. We know that proteins are basic functional units of the human body, so mutations in their genetic precursors mean there will be changes … Continue reading →