The Flinn Foundation’s biosciences program awarded two researchers at the University of Arizona’s College of Medicine — Phoenix a $200,000 grant last month for their research on cervical cancer.
The Flinn Foundation’s grant went to Melissa Herbst-Kralovetz, PhD, and Dana Chase, MD, and was one of seven grants in the grant program the foundation introduced last year. Herbst-Kralovetz and Chase’s winning research project, “The Functional Role of the Vaginal Microbiome in Promotion of Infection Associated Cancer in High-Risk Population,” was one of several projects submitted by universities and institutions, according to Brad Halvorsen, the Flinn Foundation’s vice president for communications.
The foundation’s award was a seed grant given through their Program to Promote Translational Research. In this case, the translational research was a lab scientist and a medical doctor working together.
The UA College of Medicine — Phoenix collaborated with Dignity Health St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center for the grant. The focus of Herbst-Kralovetz and Chase’s research was the impact of different infections on women’s health, specifically involving the female reproductive tract, and how those infections could progress into cancer.
Halvorsen said the basic focus of the grants in the program was to develop collaboration between institutions.
“It’s not just to provide a grant to one institution, to work on a project in isolation, but it’s to give a grant to one institution to oftentimes join with another institution on the same project,” Halvorsen said.
Melissa Herbst-Kralovetz, an assistant professor in the Department of Basic Medical Sciences at the UA College of Medicine — Phoenix, said the collaboration with Chase was beneficial.
“I think you appreciate that it’s a collaboration between myself and Dr. Dana Chase,” Herbst-Kralovetz said. “I think that’s important because it’s a multi-disciplinary approach, where we’re taking two people that have two different expertise in working to kind of address a problem.”
The two met because of their shared interest in how bacteria in the female reproductive tract affects cancer progression.
“I was introduced to her because of my interest in women’s health and studying the innate immune mechanisms of the female reproductive tract,” Herbst-Kralovetz said. “And she’s a gyn-onc, gynecologic oncologist, and so she studies cancer in the context of the female reproductive tract. And so we started talking about how we could collaborate to study different cancers.”
This talking led to the research project that won them the grant. According to Herbst-Kralovetz, the money would be used to recruit patients, for both women with and without Human Papillomavirus, to look into if there is a link or a change in the resident bacteria that would progress into cervical cancer.
Chase, an assistant professor at the UA Cancer Center at St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center, Division of Gynecologic Oncology, also said collaboration between a bench scientist, or a lab scientist who conducts cellular research, and a medical doctor who typically works with patients was key for the research.
“Collaborating together, you could come up with a really interesting idea or question,” Chase said.
With the money and further research, they said the research will lead to new diagnostics, prevention or therapeutic strategies to help promote women’s health.
Contact the reporter at Nikiana.Medansky@asu.edu
