CPRIT awards UT Health San Antonio $3.4 million to increase HPV vaccination rates in Bexar County, develop transformative technologies targeting drug-resistant cancers
SAN ANTONIO (June 2, 2025) — The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (UT Health San Antonio) received $3,395,970 in new academic research and prevention awards as part of the latest $98 million funding round announced on May 21 by the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT). The state agency, which focuses on funding evidence-based cancer research and prevention efforts, has now awarded $167 million to UT Health San Antonio since 2010.
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Develop transformative technologies that better target drug-resistant cancers
Daohong Zhou, MD, tenured professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Structural Biology in the Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long School of Medicine, received CPRIT’s academic research award of over $2.4 million to expand UT Health San Antonio’s core facilities laboratories to increase researchers’ capabilities to better identify therapeutic targets and develop technologies to target hard-to-treat cancers.
Zhou, who serves as the director of the Target Discovery Core at the Greehey Children’s Cancer Research Institute at UT Health San Antonio, associate director for drug development at the Mays Cancer Center at UT Health San Antonio and director of the institution’s Center for Innovative Drug Discovery, shared that while there has been significant progress in treating cancers, we are still facing big challenges, especially with certain tough-to-treat pediatric and adult cancers like brain tumors, soft tissue sarcomas and those that do not respond well to current therapies.
“However, the absence of core facilities for target identification and validation (TIV) in Texas has limited the success in discovering and developing new cancer therapeutics because TIV is essential for drug discovery and development,” Zhou said. “In addition, the CPRIT award will allow us to acquire and develop new TIV technologies, including the state-of-the-art arrayed CRISPR knockout screening for TIV and groundbreaking small molecule degrader (SMD) discovery platform for screening SMDs to target undruggable proteins, which are not available in any other core facilities in Texas.”
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