Ryan Stowers, an assistant professor in the departments of Mechanical Engineering and Bioengineering at UC Santa Barbara, ended the year on an especially high note. His work to explore how cells interact and are influenced by the mechanical properties of their environments, an area of study known as mechanobiology, received a boost of nearly $600,000 in combined funding from the American Cancer Society (ACS) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
“I’m thrilled to receive these grants from the ACS and NIH to fund our work in understanding mechanobiology of cancer and cardiovascular disease,” said Stowers, whose previous honors include a Faculty Fellowship from the Hellman Foundation, and Young Investigator awards from the Breast Cancer Alliance and the Cells, Tissue, Organs Journal. “These diseases are by far the two leading causes of death in the U.S.”
The ACS selected Stowers as a member of its inaugural class for the Catalyst Award, an honor intended to “catalyze” early-career researchers with high-scoring, but not yet funded research projects either recently submitted to the ACS or the National Cancer Institute (NCI). The awards, for one year and $150,000 in direct costs, are intended to sustain the projects and support investigators as they continue to apply for research grants.
“We recognize that there has been a decrease in available funding for cancer research, resulting in a surplus of innovative and potentially impactful research projects that have gone unfunded, so we’re excited to be able to support these important investigations,” said Dr. William Dahut, chief scientific officer at the American Cancer Society, in an ACS press release.
In his ACS–supported project, Stowers will investigate cancer cells, which are known to have chemical modifications to DNA that do not alter the DNA sequence, as a mutation does, but instead cause what is called epigenetic change, or a shift in how the DNA is organized and accessed by cellular machinery. Tumor mechanics can exacerbate many aspects of cancer; however, it is not known whether the mechanical properties of a tumor’s environment can also induce epigenetic changes, and if so, through what biological pathways. Through the ACS Catalyst funding, Stowers and researchers in his group will test their hypothesis by using mechanically tunable 3D hydrogels as artificial tumor microenvironments to validate their flndings in mouse-tumor models. Hydrogels are soft, water-swollen materials that can absorb large amounts of water or biological fluids without dissolving.
“Using our engineered artificial-tumor microenvironments, we can test the extent to which the mechanical properties of the tumor environment specifically can drive cancer progression and metastasis through epigenetic changes,” said Stowers. “We’ll also learn how well our engineered tumor models recapitulate the complexity of tumors in the body by comparison to tumors grown in mice.”
Stowers and his co-principal investigator, Beth Pruitt, a mechanical engineering professor and chair of the Bioengineering Department, also recently received an NIH R21 Exploratory/ Developmental Research Grant from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI). The colleagues will receive nearly $430,000 over two years to gain insight into cardiomyopathy, a disease that affects the heart muscle by altering the structure and stiffness of cardiac tissue.