Supervised by faculty member Priyamvada Rai, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Medicine’s Division of Medical Oncology, third-year Ph.D. candidate Clara Troccoli received a fellowship grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National Cancer Institute.

Troccoli, an investigator in Dr. Rai’s Sylvester-affiliated cancer biology lab, is leading a research project to learn whether activation of a novel signaling pathway can be enhanced through repurposing non-cancer-related, FDA-approved drugs. The goal is to limit castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC), an incurable and terminal form of the malignancy. This pathway was identified in a novel cell-based screen developed in the Rai lab, which already yielded another validated CRPC target, thioredoxin-1. That previous research by Dr. Rai, Troccoli, and others appeared in 2017 in Nature Communications.

In addition, Troccoli won the 2018 Larry Oberley Young Investigator Award at the Society for Redox Biology and Medicine Annual Meeting in Chicago. Troccoli was awarded the highest-scored abstract/presentation in cancer biology research for her investigation of molecular drivers of androgen deprivation resistance and emergence of CRPC.

“I am humbled and honored to receive each of these national awards,” Troccoli said. “The NIH fellowship allows me to continue investigating the molecular mechanisms that need to be either inhibited or promoted for optimal treatment of advanced prostate cancer and jump starts my career as a future independent researcher. And it’s great to be recognized with the young investigator award from this national group of redox biology experts.”