In 2016, Dr Holger Auner was awarded an Early Stage Research Start-up grant (ESR) from BSH. This award contributed to the successful application for a CRUK Small Molecule Drug Discovery Award that was activated in 2019 and will focus on validating a potential new therapeutic target to overcome proteasome inhibitor resistance.
This work has since been published in the journal Oncogene, which you can read here.
"My research group works on aspects of intracellular protein homeostasis (proteostasis) in cancer cells and non-transformed cells, with a particular interest in multiple myeloma. The ultimate goal of our work is to find ways to disrupt proteostasis in malignant cells while largely sparing non-cancerous cells. This aim builds on the proposition that cancer cells, and in particular myeloma cells, are highly dependent on the mechanisms that co-ordinate protein degradation and synthesis. This notion is supported by the clinical success of inhibitors of the proteasome, the main effector of intracellular protein degradation.
The BSH grant allowed us to complete a set of experiments that formed a key part of a project that has now been completed, with a manuscript under review (May 2018). The grant also enabled us to conduct a set of preliminary experiments that supported a successful grant application with an industry partner and another grant application that has been submitted to a UK organisation. While the experiments that were funded by the BSH grant formed part of a larger work programme, the results of these experiments became important components of both the submitted manuscript and the grant applications, providing critical support for our conclusions and hypotheses."
For further information, please see Dr Auner's full grant report.
Following the publication of his research, Dr Auner spoke to BSH about the impact that our ESR grant had.
"The BSH award provided critical support for experiments which we would have struggled to do without. The work that was enabled by the BSH award contributed to a paper we published in Oncogene and was instrumental in submitting a successful application for a CRUK Small Molecule Drug Discovery grant."