Dr. Goldberg Receives NIH Grants to Advance Research in Cell-to-Cell Communications and Contact Normalization
Gary Goldberg, Ph.D., founder and Chief Scientific Officer for Sentrimed, has been awarded two grants from the National Institute of Health (NIH) to fund his research on contact normalization and oral cancer. Dr. Goldberg received an R15 award issued to Rowan University to fund research to elucidate how junctional communication between cells affects tumor cell growth and expansion, as well as how PDPN affects immune response in oral cancer patients. Dr. Goldberg also received an STTR award issued to Sentrimed in collaboration with Rowan University to examine the effects of MASL on oral cancer cell growth, expansion, PDPN expression, and patient immune response in an ongoing FDA approved Phase 1 clinical trial. This work will enhance technology that Sentrimed has licensed from Rowan University to prevent and combat cancers that rely on PDPN expression including glioma, ovarian cancer, and melanoma and other skin cancers in addition to our current focus on oral cancer. In particular, the ongoing Phase 1 clinical trial is designed to assess how MASL can inhibit oral cancer cell growth and augment an anticancer immune response in oral cancer patients. Administered as a lozenge, MASL offers a way to change the oral cancer treatment paradigm from “watch and wait” to “prevent and treat.”
The NIH recognition of this research underscores our potential to address the significant need for new treatments of oral cancer, a disease with 54,000 new diagnoses in the U.S. and 120,000 deaths worldwide every year. To learn more about these NIH grants please visit: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10437217 and https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10479625. To learn more about the Phase 1 trial please visit: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04188665.