An interdisciplinary team at Stony Brook University, led by Yusuf Hannun, MD, has been awarded an $11 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study sphingolipids (SLs) and their role in cancer. The five-year grant, funded by the NIH National Cancer Institute, will support research through August 2030.
This is the only NIH Program Project Grant (P01) awarded this year to a State University of New York (SUNY) institution. These grants are designed to back long-term research programs focused on a central theme or objective.
Sphingolipids are a class of fat molecules involved in key cellular processes linked to cancer, such as cell differentiation, death, metastasis, and response to stress. They also play roles in how chemotherapeutic agents work against cancer.
“This award represents a major milestone for our institution and an important advancement in cancer research,” said Raymond Bergan, MD, director of the Stony Brook Cancer Center. “The NIH grant is yet another measure of the stature of our Cancer Center and its national leadership in understanding the role of lipids and metabolism in the formation of cancer and how that knowledge can be applied to prevention and treatment.”
Yusuf Hannun explained that investigating SLs is significant because they impact many areas of cancer therapy: “While our research with the help of this grant will be broad and far-reaching, we will initially focus on SLs in breast cancer development and therapy, the action of DNA damaging chemotherapies, and mitigating toxicity of chemotherapy,” he said.
The team has previously concentrated on breast cancer and some liver cancer studies but plans to expand into lung cancer and leukemias. Over decades, members have published more than 250 peer-reviewed papers together. Their expertise covers biochemistry, medicine, pathology, physiology, and pharmacology.
Their contributions include identifying enzymes involved in SL metabolism as potential targets for new therapeutics, developing lead compounds for anti-cancer drugs, discovering functions for specific SL enzymes related to cell migration and immune responses, and establishing SLs as biomarkers for certain cancers.
The group works within The Lipid Cancer Laboratory at Stony Brook University. This lab is part of a larger initiative called the Lipid Signaling and Metabolism in Cancer Program—one of three main research programs at the Stony Brook Cancer Center focused on discovery and therapeutics.
Currently approved SL-based treatments are limited to inflammatory bowel disease and multiple sclerosis. Some pre-clinical and clinical trials are underway testing SL-based compounds as possible options for treating cancer.
