Funding from Meaghan’s Run has supported radiation oncologist Yuhchyau Chen, M.D., Ph.D. from the James P. Wilmot Cancer Center at the University of Rochester Medical Center and her team of lung cancer research specialists. For people like Meaghan, who do not have the typical risk factor of smoking for lung cancer, research in seeking other cancer markers is highly desirable.

To date, there are no approved serum markers for lung cancer. With the funding support from Meaghan’s Run, our research team has collected clinical information of 65 lung cancer patients and processed blood samples in the planning for lung cancer marker investigations. We also conducted lung cancer marker research in the laboratory using lung cancer cell lines. We presented our laboratory work at the 100^th Annual Meeting of American Association of Cancer Research in year 2009 (Poster presentation: Nowak I, Huang J, Chen Y. Erk MAP-kinase signaling-associated neuroendocrine differentiation of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) cell line AACR 100^th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO, April 18-22, 2009).

We are in the process of planning for the serum marker studies for lung cancer. With this preliminary research we will be submitting a research proposal to the National Cancer Institute and other funding agencies in competing for external research grants in early 2011 to further this research continually. If the grant funding is received then future funding from Meaghan’s Run can start additional lung cancer research projects.