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| Inga-Marie Schaefer, MD |
Inga-Marie Schaefer, MD, of the Department of Pathology, was honored with a Last Mile Sarcoma Research Award from the Sarcoma Foundation of America (SFA) and a National Cancer Institute (NCI) Specialized Programs of Research Excellence (SPORE) Developmental Research Project grant.
The SFA Last Mile Sarcoma Research Award provides one-year grants to support translational science research on the etiology, molecular biology, pathogenesis, diagnosis and treatment of human sarcomas. Schaefer received the award for her project “Identification of Therapeutic Strategies to Restore Cell Cycle Control in GIST,” which aims to decipher the mechanisms of cell cycle perturbations in gastrointestinal stromal tumors, paving the way for the recovery of new diagnostic and therapeutic strategies.
Schaefer received a Developmental Research Project award for her research “Targeting Cell Cycle Dysregulation in Sarcomas with Complex Karyotypes,” which aims to identify abnormalities of the cell division machinery that cause uncontrolled tumor growth in leiomyosarcoma (LMS) and genetically related sarcomas and leverage these abnormalities as therapeutic targets. The project is part of a larger multi-institutional SPORE study, "Genetics and Genomics of Leiomyosarcoma: Improved Understanding of Cancer Biology and New Approaches to Diagnosis and Treatment,” which more broadly seeks to improve the knowledge regarding LMS genetics, biology and therapeutic approaches to rationally develop novel and more effective therapies.
The Sarcoma Foundation of America is a nonprofit organization that advocates for sarcoma patients by funding research and increasing awareness about the disease. The National Cancer Institute, the federal government’s principal agency for cancer research and training, is one of the 27 institutes and centers that comprise the National Institutes of Health.
