Pomerantz awarded $3.5M from National Institutes for Health for cancer research
MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (1/30/2025) – Merck Professor of Chemistry William C. K. Pomerantz and his collaborative team at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital have been awarded a $3,500,000 grant through the National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health. The grant will fund the team’s work in the area of epigenetic therapy, a kind of cancer treatment that targets aberrant gene expression.
Recently, Pomerantz and his collaborators discovered a new role for a nucleosome-remodeling protein called Bromodomain PHD finger transcription factor (BPTF) in regulating the disease progression of a childhood cancer, called neuroblastoma. Neuroblastoma is a neuroendocrine tumor that arises in the developing sympathetic nervous system and is the most common malignancy diagnosed in children under the age of one. Nearly 40% of children diagnosed with neuroblastoma are high-risk, half of which fail to achieve a lasting positive response using current therapy. One of the specific mechanisms Pomerantz and his collaborators are exploring is a new finding that BPTF regulates the expression of a key oncogene, MYCN, which is highly associated with high risk neuroblastoma.
This work was previously supported by a generous donation from the Muggee family through the Muggee Research Award for Pediatric Cancer and builds on the research program that Pomerantz has grown in his lab at the University of Minnesota Department of Chemistry over the past thirteen years. His lab members have developed first-in-class synthetic inhibitors for specific structural domains of BPTF. Through this collaborative research, they seek to further optimize the drug-like properties of their new inhibitor leads for developing in-vivo ready chemical probes, while establishing the functional significance of each structural domain for developing a new epigenetic therapy. This interdisciplinary work blends biophysics, synthetic chemistry, and cell biology to uncover new results in the areas of cancer treatment and gene regulation.
Learn more about Pomerantz and his research group and the UMN Epigenetics Consortium.