The Dartmouth Innovations Accelerator for Cancer (DIAC), a partnership between the Dartmouth Cancer Center and the Magnuson Center for Entrepreneurship, has awarded funding to five teams from the second cohort of the program. 

Congratulations to all of the funded research teams, led by:

• Brock Christensen, Professor of Epidemiology at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine, and Lucas Salas, Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine
• Jiwon Lee, the Ralph and Marjorie Crump Assistant Professor at Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College 
• Yashi Ahmed, Professor of Professor of Molecular and Systems Biology at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine
• Karl Griswold, Professor of Engineering at Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College
• Paul Robustelli, Assistant Professor of Chemistry in the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology

If you have an idea for a new therapeutic, medical device, or diagnostic to help fight cancer, click here to apply to be in the 3rd Cohort of the Dartmouth Innovations Accelerator for Cancer.

In the meantime, read more about the life-changing impact of DIAC:

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Over the winter Arti Gaur, PhD, assistant professor of neurology at the Dartmouth Cancer Center and Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine received a call from Sadiq Malik, D ’00. Malik had read about Gaur’s groundbreaking work to develop a treatment for gliomas, a rare form of brain cancer. This science was personal for Malik. His wife had been diagnosed with brain cancer in her 30s and her brother had died from a glioblastoma, a type of tumor that leaves patients with an average life expectancy of just 12-18 months. Malik hadn’t realized that research about the disease that had wreaked havoc on his family was happening at his alma mater.

For Gaur, the call with Malik was heart-wrenching, but affirming, driving to the root cause of why she’s so passionate about extending life expectancy for glioma patients.

“If you’re not in touch with humanity, what are we doing this for?” says Gaur. “We’re doing this to make a positive social impact. It could be one of us being treated. It could be one of us on the other end of the diagnosis, knowing where the trajectory ends.”

Today, Gaur and her team are  closer to changing that trajectory, thanks in part to funding secured through the Dartmouth Innovations Accelerator for Cancer (DIAC), a partnership between the Dartmouth Cancer Center and the Magnuson Center for Entrepreneurship. Gaur participated in the first cohort of the accelerator and was awarded $300,000 in funding in May 2021. Over the past year she used those funds to conduct research showing that a new therapeutic compound synthesized by Glenn Micalizio, PhD, the New Hampshire Professor of Chemistry at Dartmouth, kills brain tumor cells while leaving healthy human cells intact...

Read the full story about how DIAC funding is changing the landscape for cancer research at the Geisel School of Medicine site.