AMARILLO, TEXAS -- Some of the country's top cancer researchers are meeting this weekend in Amarillo. It's part of the Texas Tech Health Sciences Center School of Pharmacy's cancer symposium.
Friday evening, the guest speaker was Dr. Alfred G. Gilman, the Nobel Prize winner in Physiology or Medicine, who is also the Chief Scientific Officer for CPRIT. That stands for Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas.
He oversees the grant and award process and will help researchers here get more funding. CPRIT is empowered by the Texas Constitution, which invested $3 billion over 10 years to help cancer research and prevention activities. Dr. Gilman is charged to ensure that grant monies fund the most meritorious attempts to discover more effective ways to prevent, diagnose, and treat cancer.
"Cancer is an enormously complicated problem. We used to talk about cancer as a disease, then we got smart and talked about it as 100 disease, and now we're getting smarter and know it's many more than that. There's many many different kinds of breast cancer's, there's many different kinds of lung cancers. We have to understand each one and learn how to treat it," said Dr. Gilman. He received the Nobel Prize for his discovery of G proteins and the role these proteins play in regulation of cell function. He has also received other significant recognition for his work, including election to the US. National Academy of Sciences, the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, the Medal of Honor from the American Cancer Society, and several honorary degrees.
Researchers at the TTUHS campus in Amarillo have so far received CPRIT funds for two major projects: a $1.6 million grant was awarded to Marjorie Jenkins, M.D. Of the TTUHSC School of Medicine to improve access to breast care for West Texas and a $1 million grant was awarded to Quentin Smith, Ph.D. And cancer researchers at the TTUHSC-SOP to purchase a major new multiphoton microscope to study cancer development and treatment.
