Welcome from the Director of the GCCRI
Mays Cancer Center Annual Report
The Greehey Children’s Cancer Research Institute has had another outstanding year. We continue to recruit highly talented international scientists, and our research has been reported in high impact journals.
In the area of gene editing, we recruited Pilar Blancafort, Ph.D., from the University of Western Australia. Dr. Blancafort will develop a novel program based on precision medicine approaches applied to targeting novel biological targets and the development of state-of-the-art gene-editing techniques to target treatment-resistant tumors.
Research at the Greehey Institute has lead to repurposing a novel drug for the treatment of breast cancer, and research here has contributed to radically changing the treatment of pediatric low-grade brain tumors.
Along with efforts to recruit exceptional talent, we have increased federal and state funding by almost three-fold since 2015, with projected grant support from the National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Defense, National Science Foundation, and private foundations in 2020. Interactions between faculty at the Greehey Institute are increasing, as shown by the submission of multi-investigator grants to the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas.
The Greehey Institute looks forward to continuing to develop drugs and drug combinations that move into clinical trials at UT Health San Antonio and through the Children’s Oncology Group, an NCI-supported clinical trials group and the world’s largest organization devoted exclusively to childhood and adolescent cancer research.
Thank you for your support of our efforts.
Peter Houghton, Ph.D.
Director, Greehey Children’s Cancer Research Institute
Greehey Distinguished Chair for the
Children’s Cancer Research Institute
