RICHMOND, Va. — April 8, 2026 — The VCU Massey Comprehensive Cancer Center has successfully completed the inaugural funding cycle of its VCU–Sanford Burnham Prebys Drug Discovery Collaborative Program, a landmark collaboration with the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute (SBP) in La Jolla, California. The program encourages Massey investigators to identify optimal small-molecule agents against novel, high-value cancer targets, accelerating the translation of fundamental discoveries into therapeutic opportunities.
Through its Molecules to Medicine (M2M) initiative, Massey is proud to celebrate the first awards from this new collaborative program. Two Massey projects have been selected to receive $50,000 each in project funding to advance innovative cancer drug discovery efforts.
“This milestone marks a new era in translational cancer research at Massey,” said Robert A. Winn , M.D., director and Lipman Chair in Oncology at Massey. “By partnering with the world-class capabilities at SBP, we are enabling our investigators to move rapidly from biological discovery to the identification of potential therapeutic agents that could ultimately benefit patients.”
The two funded projects, which will be co-led by SBP, are:
Both projects represent innovative strategies to uncover vulnerabilities in cancer biology and exemplify the collaborative and translational goals of the M2M initiative, which seeks to take clinical research from the laboratory to the patient’s bedside by supporting scientists in developing new cancer therapies and bringing promising treatments to clinical trials more quickly.
“We are extremely excited about this partnership between Massey and SBP,” said Said M. Sebti , Ph.D., M2M executive director, associate director of basic research at Massey, and a professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology at the VCU School of Medicine. “This collaboration complements our internal capabilities by providing access to outstanding assay development expertise and industry-level high-throughput compound screening, allowing our faculty to pursue ambitious drug discovery projects against novel cancer targets.”
These collaborations are designed to not only identify promising small-molecule compounds but also to generate the robust preliminary data packages needed to support competitive NIH and NCI R01 grant applications and future translational development.
“Both projects are being executed in formal partnership with the Prebys Center for Drug Discovery at SBP,” said Shamik Ghosh , Ph.D., M2M director of operations. “The center is one of the nation’s leading academic drug discovery facilities, renowned for its high-throughput screening platforms, medicinal chemistry expertise and track record of translating basic biology into therapeutic candidates.”