An interdisciplinary team at Stony Brook University, led by Yusuf Hannun, MD, has been awarded an $11 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study the role of sphingolipids in cancer. The five-year grant, funded by the NIH National Cancer Institute, will run through August 2030 and is the only NIH Program Project Grant (P01) given this year to a State University of New York (SUNY) institution.
Sphingolipids are a class of fat molecules that regulate many cellular pathways and functions linked to cancer. They play roles in cell differentiation, death, metastasis, and how cells respond to stress. Some sphingolipids also influence how chemotherapeutic agents work against cancer.
“This award represents a major milestone for our institution and an important advancement in cancer research,” said Raymond Bergan, MD, director of the Stony Brook Cancer Center. “The NIH grant is yet another measure of the stature of our Cancer Center and its national leadership in understanding the role of lipids and metabolism in the formation of cancer and how that knowledge can be applied to prevention and treatment.”
Dr. Hannun noted that studying sphingolipids is significant because their impact extends across several types of cancer therapies: “While our research with the help of this grant will be broad and far-reaching, we will initially focus on SLs in breast cancer development and therapy, the action of DNA damaging chemotherapies, and mitigating toxicity of chemotherapy,” he said.
So far, research efforts have centered on breast cancer and some work on liver cancer. The new funding will allow expansion into lung cancers and leukemias as well.
The investigative group has published over 250 peer-reviewed articles together over decades. Their work spans biochemistry, medicine, pathology, physiology, and pharmacology. Past achievements include identifying enzymes involved in sphingolipid metabolism as potential targets for new cancer drugs; developing lead compounds for anti-cancer therapies; discovering functions for specific enzymes related to cell migration, survival, immune responses; and investigating their use as biomarkers.
Team members plan to collaborate with other researchers at Stony Brook University and nationwide to move findings from basic science toward new treatments.
The Lipid Cancer Laboratory leads this initiative within Stony Brook’s Lipid Signaling and Metabolism in Cancer Program—one of three main research programs at the university’s Cancer Center focused on discovery and therapeutics.
Currently approved medical uses for sphingolipid-based drugs are limited to inflammatory bowel disease and multiple sclerosis. However, there are ongoing pre-clinical and clinical studies testing these compounds as possible treatments for various cancers.