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Five scientists from the ӳý and its partners have won federal grants to pursue projects with the potential to transform scientific research and more rapidly bring biomedical advances to patients.

The National Institutes of Health is awarding approximately $155 million to 81 researchers across the country who are pursuing visionary science through its High Risk High Reward program, supported by the NIH Common Fund.

A new paper published online in Nature holds out hope that people with the second most common type of lung cancer may one day benefit from targeted therapies that have transformed treatments for other lung cancer patients.

Squamous cell lung cancer kills more people each year than breast, colorectal, or prostate cancer, ranking second only to lung adenocarcinoma in the number of deaths it causes. But unlike the most common form of lung cancer, squamous cell carcinoma has no treatments aimed at the specific genetic alterations that drive it.

Most of the DNA alterations that are tied to disease do not alter protein-coding genes, but rather the “switches” that control them. Characterizing these switches is one of many goals of the ENCODE project – a sweeping, international effort to create a compendium of all of the working parts of the human genome that have not been well studied or well understood.

RNA interference, a gene-silencing phenomenon discovered in the late 1990s, was hailed for its potential as a treatment in cancer and other diseases. But finding a way to deliver short stretches of RNA to tumors  safely and effectively has been challenging. By themselves, small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) break down quickly and invade tumors poorly, so they need a delivery vehicle.

Now one exciting technology is enabling another. Scientists have successfully targeted cancer cells in mice by creating tumor-penetrating nanoparticles to carry siRNAs as their cargo.