This year, funding from NFL Charities, long-time supporters of the Piccolo Fund, will support promising lung cancer early detection research at Rush University Medical Center. This type of cancer is the most common cause of cancer-related death in men and women, and is responsible for 1.3 million deaths worldwide annually, according to the World Health Organization. Support from the Piccolo Fund is helping to develop new tools to detect lung cancer earlier in the disease cycle and to increase survival rates by helping clinicians predict which chemotherapy regimens will most benefit specific patients.
Funded in part by the Piccolo Fund through NFL Charities, Jeffrey Borgia, PhD, is assistant professor in biochemistry and pathology at Rush. Dr. Borgia’s research efforts are focused on the development of new diagnostic tests to predict whether a patient will be responsive to traditional first-line chemotherapy or whether an alternative treatment scheme would provide more benefit for that patient. The “systems biology” approach employed for this study is a novel arena in the biomedical sciences that integrates several key disciplines in cancer biology, including proteomics, genomics, and transcriptomics.
