NEW YORK – The Nagourney Cancer Institute on Monday said that the precision oncology-focused Vanguard Cancer Foundation, which recently received a $2 million gift from the Rosalie and Harold Rae Brown Foundation, will support its metabolomics research.
Specifically, Nagourney will put part of the gift toward using mass spectrometry to explore the role of metabolomics in cancer. The Long Beach, California-based institute plans to analyze metabolites in patients' bloodstreams and investigate their role in cancer development, as well as their implications for treatment. The mass spectrometry approach will allow Nagourney's researchers to study these metabolites with greater sensitivity and on a larger scale.
"Despite the cancer industry's focus on genomics, there is the growing recognition that cancer represents dysregulated energy metabolism," Robert Nagourney, the Nagourney Cancer Institute's founder and medical director, said in a statement. The gift "will help our investigators study basic features of human metabolism to advance our understanding of the causes and treatments of cancer."