September 1, 2021
The National Institutes of Health’s National Cancer Institute has awarded Kristy Ainslie, Ph.D. with a $1,761,616 grant to develop a new therapy for glioblastoma – the most common primary brain tumor in the United States.
Glioblastoma accounts for 48 percent of all primary malignant brain tumors, with more than 13,000 people in the United States diagnosed each year, according to the National Brain Tumor Society. Even with surgical resection, radiation, and chemotherapy, the median survival remains of only 12-15 months, and about 10,000 Americans die from the disease each year.
Ainslie’s five-year award will support her work, “Tunable Temporal Drug Release for Optimized Synergistic Combination Therapy of Glioblastoma,” which aims to utilize combination therapy that is implanted into the brain at the time of a patient’s tumor resection surgery. The chemotherapy is then released over time from a polymer scaffold, to better treat any cancer that may reoccur after resection.
Ainslie, chair of the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy’s Division of Pharmacoengineering and Molecular Pharmaceutics, will work with UNC’s Shawn Hingtgen, Ph.D., and William Zamboni, Pharm.D., Ph.D., as well as Duke Cancer Center’s Peter Fecci, MD, Ph.D., to create an optimized elution of chemotherapeutics from a nanofibrous controlled-release scaffold.
“Glioblastoma is a devastating brain cancer that needs new treatment options because even with chemotherapy, radiation, and surgical resection, tumor recurrence almost always leads to death,” Ainslie said. “One day we hope to translate this work to the clinic to better treat this difficult and lethal cancer.”
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