Research

• 
• 
• 
• 

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.

Using mouse skin as a model system, J. Scott Beeler, Jennifer Pietenpol, PhD, and colleagues found that p73 is required for the timely healing of cutaneous wounds. In normal tissue, p73 expression increased in response to wounding, whereas p73 deficiency resulted in delayed wound healing, they reported in the journal PLOS ONE.

After a cancer patient receiving an immunotherapy developed encephalitis and died 18 months into treatment, researchers at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center (VICC) investigated why the complication occurred, performing a molecular analysis of the disease’s pathology and mining data to determine the incidence of similar occurrences.