UGA doctoral student Nikitha Sundaresha shares findings from a study in canine cancer with Winship’s Carlos Moreno, PhD.
Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University and the University of Georgia (UGA) recently hosted nearly 100 researchers for the 2023 UGA-Winship Cancer Research Summit on the UGA campus in Athens, Ga. This year’s summit highlighted the research strengths of the two institutions and explored opportunities to collaborate on cancer prevention, diagnosis and treatment efforts.
The summit featured a keynote presentation from American Cancer Society program manager Nicole Lopanik, PhD, who discussed the impact of the organization’s research funding program and opportunities for grant-seekers. Faculty, trainees and students presented emerging cancer research spanning basic, translational, clinical and population sciences. Past recipients of UGA-Winship Summit pilot grants shared updates on their inter-institutional projects, "Development of a Topical Sodium Nanoparticle Therapeutic for Head and Neck Cancer" (principal investigators: Jin Xie, PhD, and Yong Teng, PhD), and "Proteoglycans in the Glioblastoma Tumor Microenvironment" (principal investigators: Lohitash Karumbaiah, PhD, MS, and Renee Read, PhD).
The day was capped off by a reception and scientific poster session featuring research from UGA and Winship students, trainees and research staff, with awards given to the top-scoring posters from each institution.
UGA and Winship poster award winners include:
- Making their own off switch: Fgl2 produced by antigen-specific CD8+ T cells tempers the CD8+ T-cell response via apoptosis of FcγRIIB+ CD8+ T cells
Kelsey Bennion
Doctoral student, Cancer Biology Graduate Program, Department of Surgery
Emory University, Winship Cancer Institute - Targeting MGAT1 in Tumor Immune Evasion and Triple Negative Breast Cancer Immunotherapy
Junlong (Jack) Chi
Doctoral student, Department of Pharmacology and Chemical Biology
Emory University, Winship Cancer Institute - Impact of Microglial RGS10 Regulation of Inflammatory Mediators in the Glioblastoma Tumor Microenvironment
Philly Dean
Doctoral student, Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Sciences Graduate Program
University of Georgia - An efficient pipeline to identify canine somatic mutations using tumor-only RNA-seq data
Kun-Lin Ho
Graduate student, Bioinformatics Graduate Program
University of Georgia
The summit’s steering committee members included representatives from Winship and UGA and are listed below.
- Eugene Douglass, PhD (UGA)
- Natarajan Kannan, PhD (UGA)
- Eileen Kennedy, PhD (UGA)
- Kim Kerstann, PhD (Winship)
- Gregory Lesinski, PhD, MPH (Winship)
- Adam Marcus, PhD (Winship)
- Carlos Moreno, PhD (Winship)
- Kannan Natarajan, PhD (UGA)
- Chrystal Paulos, PhD (Winship)
- Corey Saba, PhD (UGA)
- Khalid Salaita, PhD (Winship)
- Lisa Sudmeier, MD, PhD (Winship)
- Mylin Torres, MD (Winship)
- Shaying Zhao, PhD (UGA)