UW-Madison biomedical engineering professor Pamela Kreeger received a prestigious prize awarded to cutting-edge scientists whose research, if fruitful, has the potential to be incredibly impactful.
Kreeger, who was one of 84 scientists across the country to earn the 2014 New Innovator Award from the National Institutes of Health, focuses her work in the field of ovarian cancer research.
Though it is not one of the most common cancers, ovarian cancer has a high mortality rate, possibly because of consistently late diagnoses.
Kreeger hypothesizes that a factor in the spread of ovarian cancer could be protein expression because some ovarian cancer cells lack a shared mutation but have varying levels of gene expression.
“The proteins are all potentially there and may function in the normal way, but their relative levels are skewed,” Kreeger said in a university release. “I am trying to figure out what we can target as a result of this variation.”
Using this new grant money, Kreeger and her students plan to study how ovarian cancer cells behave as they spread through a woman’s body, using in vitro culture systems as models.
