Active Research Funding
Cornet UAMS/UTMHSC Award (Griffin/Yallapu, PIs) 09/01/2017-08/30/2018
TNF-Targeted Nanomedicine for Improved Chemotherapy and Radiation Treatment in HNSCC
Major goals: To develop a new nanogel formulation of TNF-loaded nanoparticles for improved tumor therapy.
RGA011 Pinnacle Biologics, LLC (Griffin, PI) 07/01/2017-06/30/2018
Thermal therapy for improvement of photofrin-based PDT
Major goals: To determine the increase in photosensitizer uptake and improvement in tumor control when moderate thermal therapy is applied to a head and neck carcinoma model.
AWD00052238 Graphitic Nano Onions LLC (Griffin, PI) 7/6/2017 – 7/5/2020
Carbon nanoonion technology for advanced theranostic applications in cancer therapy
Major goals: To explore and quantify the potential of carbon nano-onions to be used as an ultrasound or photoacoustic imaging agent and function as a thermal ablation enhancement agent against solid tumors.
4P20GM103625-05 (Smeltzer, M; PI) 05/01/2017–04/30/2022
NIH/NIGMS COBRE
Center for Microbial Pathogenesis and host Inflammatory Responses
ROLE: mentor for project 4 (Dings, PL)
NSF EPSCoR (Zou and McClure, PIs) 08/01/2015-07/31/2020
Arkansas Advancing and Supporting Science, Engineering, and Technology Multifunctional and tunable Nanostructured Surfaces (ASSET) III
The goal is to develop durable, low friction, self-sharpening multifunction surfaces for various applications, including biomedical.
ROLE: Co-Investigator, aECM co-leader, UAMS overall administrative PI. Work focused on exosome characterization when cells are grown on various surfaces to be produced by the materials group, working towards new approaches for stem cell differentiation and improving cell-cell crosstalk.
R01 EB017217 (Zharov, PI) 07/01/2014–06/30/2019
NIBIB/NIH
Photoswitchable nanoprobes for in-vivo flow cytometry
ROLE: Co-Investigator. Major goals: to utilize photoswitchable chemistry to probe the origin and destination of circulating tumor cells before and after development of metastatic lesions and before, during and after therapy.
R01CA188500 (Xia, F; PD/PI) 09/02/2014 – 08/31/2020
Novel functions of Pyruvate kinase M2 in DNA double-strand break repair
Major Goals: To identify cancer risks and risk reduction strategies, to identify factors that cause cancer in patients, and to discover and develop mechanisms for cancer prevention in patients.
R01CA163838 (Xia, F; PD/PI) 07/12/2012 – 04/30/2019
GSK3b mediates radiation-induced cytotoxicity in hippocampal neurons.
Major Goals: A formidable challenge in the treatment of primary and metastatic brain cancers, especially in children, is the long-term neurocognitive deficiencies resulting from cranial irradiation (IR)-induced hippocampal neuronal apoptosis. Our laboratory has discovered a novel functional connection between the metabolic kinase GSK3¿ and the Non- homologous End-joining (NHEJ) pathway that repair DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs).
R01CA118158 (Xia,F; PD/PI) 09/26/2006 – 10/31/2012
The role of BRCA1 in nonhomologous repair of chromosomal double-strand breaks
Major Goals: The long-term objective of this research is to understand the mechanisms that regulate the repair of chromosomal double-strand breaks (DSB), arisen during physiological processes or after ionizing radiation or chemotherapy. We aim to learn the impact of deregulated DSB repair on cellular mutagenic processes and genomic instability that promote carcinogenesis.
Development Enhancement Awards for Proposals (DEAP) (Leung, J; PI)
Mechanistic Characterization of the cell cycle-dependent DNA repair pathway