Medicine News Archive Featured in the Media JeffNEWS Kimmel Cancer Center

Molecular biologist Nianli Sang, M.D., Ph.D., of Jefferson Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia has received a two-year grant for nearly $180,000 from the prestigious W.W. Smith Charitable Trust to study the role of a unique molecular switch in the development of cancer.

Dr. Sang, assistant professor of medicine in the Cardeza Foundation for Hematologic Research at Jefferson Medical College and the Kimmel Cancer Center at Jefferson, is using the funding to focus on novel biological pathways that block angiogenesis, a process by which new blood vessels form to feed cancer growth and spread. More specifically, he and his co-workers are studying HIF-1, a protein complex that promotes new blood vessel formation and tumor growth and is needed for red blood cell production. It also protects cells in lesions with reduced supplies of oxygen and glucose, which can occur in stroke and heart attack.

He and his colleagues recently discovered anti-cancer compounds that inhibit HIF-1 by two new biological pathways. He hopes to identify key components of these pathways and improve the effectiveness and safety of cancer therapies by learning how to modify HIF-1 function.

Prior to his current appointment, Dr. Sang was research assistant professor of medicine at Jefferson Medical College from 2002 to 2006. He was a postdoctoral fellow in the Cardeza Foundation in the Department of Medicine at Jefferson Medical College from 1999 to 2002, and a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Human Gene Therapy at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine from 1997 to 1999.

A member of several scientific societies, he is on the editorial board of such publications as the Journal of Experimental and Clinical Cancer Research and Frontiers in Bioscience and is a reviewer for Molecular and Cellular Biology and Clinical Cancer Research. He has published research widely in such journals as Cancer Research and the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

After receiving a bachelor of medicine (the equivalent of a doctor of medicine) at Shanghai Medical University School of Medicine in Shanghai, China in 1988, Dr.Sang went on to earn a doctor of philosophy degree in Genetics at Thomas Jefferson University in 1997.

The W.W. Smith Charitable Trust funds basic medical research in the areas of heart, cancer, AIDS and juvenile diabetes. It identifies and finances projects that are unique and tries to select promising researchers that have the potential to attract the National Institutes of Health, or other large funding organizations after the Trust’s support. Grants have generally been given to promote basic medical research, and for faculty with appointments in universities, hospitals and research centers in the Delaware Valley.