A new method developed at Vanderbilt may help “inventory” all tumor-promoting genes.

Vanderbilt’s Ian Macara, Ph.D., has won an Outstanding Investigator Award from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) — nearly $6.6 million over seven years — to support the “unusual potential” of his research, which seeks to understand and predict cancer cell “behavior.”

Ian Macara, Ph.D., professor and chair of the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology, recently returned from Scotland, where he received this year’s Colin Thomson Memorial Medal for his contributions to cancer research.

A protein essential for growth of normal breast tissue also may play a role in breast cancer, Vanderbilt University researchers have found.

The machinery that builds the characteristic shape of epithelial cells suppresses breast cancer formation and metastasis in a mouse model.