A UMass Medical School researcher has been awarded $3.2 million to advance her lab’s study of cells that helps understand cancer development.
Dr. Jennifer Benanti, an associate professor of molecular, cell and cancer biology, was awarded funding from the federal National Institutes of Health’s Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award, the Worcester medical school reported. The funding is expected to total $3.2 million over five years, the school said.
Benanti’s research attempts to understand how cells control division, which can help know more about cancer cells. All cancer cells proliferate too much, but still too little is known about them, Benanti said in UMass Medical School’s announcement of the funding.Â
A goal of her study, she said, will be to determine how cells divide using budding yeast, because the genes and pathways controlling cell division in yeast also regulate division of human cells.
