November News

CRAVAT AWARDS LABORATORY THAT FOUND THE KEY GENETIC ALTERATION OF EHE

We are VERY pleased to announce that last week, CRAVAT gave a significant award  to Dr. Brian Rubin of the Cleveland Clinic to support his basic research on  epithelioid hemangioendothelioma (EHE). Dr. Rubin holds both MD and PhD degrees and has been a professor of Anatomic Pathology and worked in the Department of Molecular Biology at the Cleveland Clinic since 2006. He is an expert in the field of sarcoma research and has been active in studies of gastrointestinal stromal tumor (GIST) and EHE. He was a member of the team that discovered the clinical utility of imantinib in treatment of GIST and more recently discovered the specific genetic alteration underlying EHE: a translocation between chromosomes 1 and 3 is now understood to be disease defining for this disease. The $15,000 award is specifically intended to support development of a cell culture model of EHE that will allow better understanding of the molecular biology of EHE and screening of potential treatments. Our goal is to continue to support Dr. Rubin’s and other, similarly productive laboratories whose studies can lead to a cure for EHE and other vascular tumors.

A link to his most recent ground-breaking paper: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.proxy.cc.uic.edu/pubmed/21885404