NEW YORK, May 2, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Stand Up To Cancer (SU2C) has awarded a total of $1 million to five teams of cancer researchers to advance "innovation in collaboration" among SU2C-affiliated scientists. Each team, consisting of researchers from different SU2C-supported "Dream Teams" or research programs, will receive a grant of $200,000 to support new research projects stemming from previous advances in cancer research from the SU2C community. Four of the five teams are focused on immunotherapy and the fifth on DNA repair.

"From the beginning, Stand Up To Cancer has striven to break down silos, encourage collaboration, and bring together the best research that will benefit cancer patients," said Phillip A. Sharp, PhD, Chair of SU2C's Scientific Advisory Committee and a Nobel Prize winner for his research in genetics. "These awards will help bring us closer to the day we defeat cancer."

The award program was established in 2014 by SU2C to honor Sharp's keen interest in team research, with a scientific review and oversight process managed by SU2C's Scientific Partner, the American Association for Cancer Research. The Phillip A. Sharp Innovation in Collaboration Awards are intended to reward distinctive collaborations that propose to accelerate current research and development models, bringing therapeutic benefits for cancer patients. Brief, initial proposals were reviewed by a committee of senior scientists led by SU2C Scientific Advisory Committee Co-Vice Chairs Arnold J. Levine, PhD, professor emeritus of systems biology at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and William G. Nelson, MD, PhD, director of the Johns Hopkins Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center in Baltimore, during the SU2C Scientific Summit in Santa Monica, California, in January.
"The research teams who submitted proposals for consideration are from quite diverse backgrounds and are innovating across a broad portfolio of projects," said Nelson. "The 19 submissions we received spanned all important issues in improving cancer research for patients — DNA sequencing and the effects of the microbiome on immunotherapies; targeted genome sequencing; and organoid research, to name a few. Moreover, the teams are unusually diverse: physicists, computer scientists, computational mathematicians and engineers coming into the lab with oncologists, geneticists and biologists to explore and test hypotheses emerging from the terabytes of new data we're now producing."

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