Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center (VICC) patient William Ostman smiled while gazing into a camera lens and declared, “I am a prostate cancer survivor.”

The Lustgarten Foundation has awarded a $1.5 million Research Investigator Grant to Stephen Fesik, Ph.D., professor of Biochemistry, Pharmacology and Chemistry, for research designed to discover new drugs for the treatment of pancreatic cancer.

Melanoma is the most lethal form of skin cancer, with high mortality rates. While new drugs have been approved to treat the disease, patients nearly always develop resistance to the therapies and the cancer advances.

A protein that degrades the “matrix” between cells participates in the development of lung metastases from primary breast cancer in mouse models and may be a good target for breast cancer treatment.

Vanderbilt University researcher William Mitchell, M.D., Ph.D., and colleagues in Germany and Canada have demonstrated a method for detecting “cell-free” tumor DNA in the bloodstream.

Understanding how zinc and the host’s immune response control H. pylori’s cancer-causing potential could suggest new therapeutic strategies to reduce infection and cancer risk.

A group of Vanderbilt-led investigators has identified a new gene mutation that may explain why some breast cancer patients do not respond to anti-hormone therapy.