UTHSC News: UT Health Science Center Researchers Partner on Multi-Institutional $20 Million Award to Develop New Radiopharmaceutical Cancer Therapies

UT Health Science Center researchers Gabor Tigyi, MD, PhD, Harriet Van Vleet Endowment Professor in Basic Oncology Research, Junming Yue, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Pathology, Sue Chin Lee, associate professor in the Department of Physiology, and David Schwartz, MD, chair of the Department of Radiation Oncology, are part of a scientific leadership group awarded $20 million from The University of Tennessee-Oak Ridge Innovation Institute (UT-ORII) in partnership with Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, to develop new radiopharmaceutical therapies to treat cancer.

The award is the first to UT Health Science Center investigators in collaboration with ORNL and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. "We are most grateful to Tennessee's legislature and to our UT President Randy Boyd for supporting UT-ORII and enabling the funding for this exciting cancer initiative, which is good news for our overall research effort, for our cancer research program, and for the people of Tennessee," said Peter Buckley, MD, chancellor of the University of Tennessee Health Science Center. "We are building a bridge to work with Oak Ridge National Laboratory and UT Knoxville, as part of a bigger effort of collaboration across the UT System. The ultimate goal is to help the citizens we serve."

This collaborative project was seeded by the D3 - Drug Discovery and Development Initiative in 2020 by Steve Goodman, PhD, former vice chancellor for Research at UT Health Science Center, and Martha Head, PhD, from ORNL. UT-ORII selected the radiopharmaceutical cancer therapeutics program and also a bioeconomy systems project as its new Convergent Research Initiatives (CRIs), areas of joint research for UT and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Over the next five years, UT and Oak Ridge National Laboratory will invest $40 million-$20 million per initiative-and work jointly to accelerate world-leading innovation and establish UT and ORNL as national leaders in these areas.

Read more at our UTHSC news site.