Newswise — New Brunswick, N.J., January 8, 2023 – Daniel Herranz Benito, PhD, PharmD, resident researcher at Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey, the state’s leading cancer program and only NCI-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center together with RWJBarnabas Health, and associate professor of pharmacology and pediatrics at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, has received a $500,000 collaborative grant from Gabrielle's Angel Foundation for Cancer Research and The Mark Foundation for Cancer Research.

The project, in collaboration with David Dominguez-Sola, MD, PhD, from Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai-Tisch Cancer Institute, aims to dissect the role of INO80 in different lymphoid malignancies. INO80, a factor involved in genome maintenance, is mutated in difficult-to-treat lymphomas, including the very rare but lethal hepatosplenic T-cell lymphoma. This project will investigate how INO80 mutations cause immune cell dysfunction and cancer through first-in-kind animal models, which might enable us to study breakthrough therapies for these lymphomas.

“This grant will allow us to investigate in detail the role INO80, of a very important player in lymphocytes which has somehow remained largely unexplored. Importantly, we believe that we can harness the knowledge to be obtained in order to find novel therapeutic strategies for the treatment of several types of very lethal lymphomas,” notes Dr. Herranz. “We are incredibly honored and extremely grateful for the support from Gabrielle’s Angel Foundation and The Mark Foundation to pursue this exciting project.”

The project period is two years.