LSU Health New Orleans has been awarded a high-risk high-reward innovation research grant. Research will be targeting heart disease and stroke. LSU Health New Orleans Assistant Professor of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics Imran Mungrue Ph.D. will the be the first researcher in Louisiana to receive this type of grant from the American Heart Association. The awarded grant will equal $150,000 over two years. The goal is to lead to major discoveries that will advance the field of cardiovascular and stroke research.
The goal of the research is to discover a new method to determine the quantities of proteins in cell samples. The goal to the extent of the research is to ultimately be able to analyze the protein landscape in a cell; in a press release, LSU Health New Orleans says this, “is the key to the understanding of the molecular basis for disease initiation, progression and effective treatment.”
As reported by NBC News, the Journal of the American Medical Association published research that suggests that nearly one-third of all cancer cases may have a link to inherited genes. Additionally, Newsweek reported that researchers found, “overall heritability for cancer was 33 percent among the entire study population, and notably higher for certain types of cancers.” Continually, “significant heritability was found in 58 percent of diagnosed skin melanomas, 57 percent of prostate cancers, 43 percent of non-melanoma skin cancers, 39 percent of ovarian cancers, 38 percent of kidney cancers, 31 percent of breast cancers and 27 percent of uterine cancers.” A list of other cancers including lung, colon and rectal cancers showed a small correlation between genes and these particular cancers.
