GW Medical Center’s Depart-ment of Pharmacology and Physiology has received a five-year research award of almost $1.3 million from the National In-stitutes of Health’s National Cancer Institute to study how cancer can develop when cells that are exposed to DNA damage fail to die off and continue to flourish into disease.

“We wish to understand the molecular mechanisms by which a cell, when exposed to DNA damage, acquires a selective growth advantage en route to cancer,” said Dr. Susan Ce-ryak, associate research professor in GW’s Departments of Pharmacology and Physiology and Medicine, who is the principal investigator for the grant. “There is considerable evidence that protein tyrosine phosphorylation is responsible through a signaling pathway that involves a protein kinase known as AKT.”

The process by which this par-ticular protein (AKT) interacts with others is complex, but the results of these studies should add new insight to our understanding of how cancer develops.

“Our work will identify the basic molecular mechanisms that are involved in the transformation of a normal cell into a cancer cell,” said Dr. Ceryak. “We hope to identify mo-lecular targets that can be exploited for anti-cancer therapy.