A fortuitous follow-up to last week’s blog about David Zaharoff and a recent grant from the Arkansas Breast Cancer Research Program, made possible by Act 1698 and the tax on cigarette and tobacco products sold in Arkansas: Zaharoff, an associate professor of biomedical engineering here at the University of Arkansas, will give the first of five scientific presentations tomorrow as part of the fall research symposium of the Arkansas Biosciences Institute.
Zaharoff’s presentation, titled “Translational Cancer Immunotherapies: Beginning at the End,” is scheduled for 9:15 a.m. in the Verizon Ballroom of the Arkansas Union, the location of entire symposium. (Years ago, as a post-doctoral fellow at the National Cancer Institute, Zaharoff combined IL-12 with chitosan, a polysaccharide derived from the shells of crustaceans. This co-formulation provided a method of delivering the cytokine directly to a tumor while avoiding systemic toxicity. A 2009 study demonstrated the power of chitosan/IL-12 when experiments eradicated bladder tumors in mice.)
As the agricultural and biomedical research program of the Tobacco Settlement Proceeds Act, the Arkansas Biosciences Institute is a partnership of scientists from the Arkansas Children’s Hospital Research Institute, Arkansas State University, the University of Arkansas-Division of Agriculture, the University of Arkansas and the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.
In accordance with the tobacco settlement, the institute conducts agricultural research with medical implications; bioengineering research, tobacco-related research, nutritional and other research aimed at preventing and treating cancer, and other areas of developing research that are related or complementary to primary programs supported by the institute.
The fall symposium is the institute’s annual meeting to highlight research in these areas and bring together researchers from the five-member institutions.
