Recent grant awards for two Medical Partnership faculty

Hardman Receives National Cancer Institute Award

William (Sonny) Hardman, M.D. associate professor of pathology at AU/UGA Medical Partnership, in collaboration with Mandi Murph, PhD, associate professor, College of Pharmacy and Drug Discovery at the University of Georgia have been awarded a funding grant for $400,000 from the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health. This grant funding is for their ongoing research on identifying molecular mechanisms attributable to premalignant changes in the etiology of malignant melanoma. The hypothesis of the research is lysophosphatidic acid signaling initiates underlying advantageous molecular changes and proliferative mechanisms that cause a population of melanocytes to progress to melanoma with higher frequency. Skin cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer and diagnoses are continuing to increase. With this research, harmful molecular changes among signaling events in skin cancer could potentially be defined to aid preventative and predictive measures.
Medlock Receives NIH Grant

Amy Medlock, Ph.D. assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the AU/ UGA Medical Partnership was awarded was a research grant from the National Institutes of Health in the amount of $450,000 this past grant cycle. The proposed research will define and characterize the role of the mitochondrial heme biosynthesis complex necessary for red blood cell development. The findings from these studies will result in new pathways and processes to target for the treatment of diseases including anemias and porphyrias. The research is seeks to discover fundamental knowledge via creative research strategies that can be applied to protecting and improving health.