CPRIT Invests Over $11 Million to Fuel UH Breakthroughs in Cancer Research
New Grants Accelerate Efforts to Advance Prevention, Diagnosis and Treatment
Two new grants from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas bring the total of active CPRIT grants at UH to $11.1 million, and both are meant to develop new strategies to fight lung cancer.
Akash Gupta joined the University of Houston Cullen College of Engineering to develop translational platforms for cancer vaccines and immunotherapies, beginning with lung cancer.
Akash Gupta joined the University of Houston Cullen College of Engineering to develop translational platforms for cancer vaccines and immunotherapies, beginning with lung cancer.
In the lab of Akash Gupta, assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, a $1.5M grant supports development of a new treatment, using mRNA, a type of genetic messenger that tells cells how to make specific proteins, to help the immune system recognize and fight cancer.
Most lung cancer patients derive limited benefit from current immunotherapies, because many tumors are naturally resistant to the treatments.
“We are developing a multifaceted immunotherapy platform combining precision drug delivery and mRNA engineering which can reprogram the tumor immune microenvironment to induce durable anti-tumor responses,” said Gupta, who is also a UH Presidential Frontier Faculty Fellow.
Gupta will also develop new, safer lipid nanoparticles to protect and deliver mRNA precisely to their targets.
“These modular mRNA-LNP platforms will catalyze collaborative efforts across the Texas Medical Center, enabling the development of novel cancer treatment strategies with broad applicability and the potential to significantly improve patient outcomes,” said Gupta.
Detecting lung cancer from a few drops of blood
A new $900,000 grant from CPRIT to Wei-Chuan Shih, professor of electrical and computer engineering, will support efforts to develop a next-generation blood test aimed at improving lung cancer detection. The technology uses a biochip-based platform to directly detect and analyze tumor-secreted exosomes from a tiny blood sample, potentially enabling more precise and less invasive cancer diagnostics.
In cancer detection, analyzing exosomes, which contain DNA and RNA, among other things, can provide direct insight into the state and identity of a cancerous cell. But current technologies for such detection are lacking, often unable to isolate or detect exosomes with precision, instead relying on inconsistent processing methods and large blood samples, limiting the level of detail they can provide about a patient’s cancer.
Cullen College of Engineering professor of electrical and computer engineering Wei-Chuan Shih.
Cullen College of Engineering professor of electrical and computer engineering Wei-Chuan Shih.
“Current analysis of circulating tumor exosomes (CTE) can only generate an overly simplistic binary outcome and lacks sufficient dynamic range,” said Shih. “Our proposal builds a biochip and automated detection technique that pushes the envelope of CTE assay by eliminating isolation and purification and directly counts and profiles exosomes from 20 microliters of blood plasma.”
Shih will team with MD Anderson Cancer Center’s Suspicion of Cancer Clinic to establish reliability, repeatability and diagnostic accuracy using patients seen at the clinic.
Ongoing UH CPRIT grants
In 2007, Texans voted to create CPRIT and to invest $3 billion in the state's unprecedented fight against cancer — one of the largest commitments of its kind in the nation. Since 2010, CPRIT has funded 1,967 awards for cancer research, product development and prevention for a total amount of $3,542,257,795.
Along with Gupta and Shih’s grants, the following are active CPRIT grants at UH bringing the total to $11.1 million:
In 2007, Texans voted to create CPRIT and to invest $3 billion in the state's unprecedented fight against cancer — one of the largest commitments of its kind in the nation. Since 2010, CPRIT has funded 1,967 awards for cancer research, product development and prevention for a total amount of $3,542,257,795.
Along with Gupta and Shih’s grants, the following are active CPRIT grants at UH bringing the total to $11.1 million:
Chandra Mohan
The Cancer Immunotherapy Biomarker Core (CIBC) is a specialized proteomics facility, to study large scale proteins at the University of Houston. Launched in May 2025 with a $3M CPRIT grant, the facility supports cancer research by enabling comprehensive biomarker screening to identify immune response targets and predict immunotherapy outcomes.
“Cancer immunotherapy is experiencing a meteoric rise, testing a variety of immune checkpoint blockades, adoptive immune cell therapy and cancer vaccines,” said Chandra Mohan, Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Endowed Professor of biomedical engineering and lead researcher at the CIBC. “This new chapter in Oncology demands a new armamentarium of biomarkers, including blood and tissue biomarkers that predict who might respond best to immunotherapy, and biomarkers that help researchers identify the best targets for immunotherapy. To meet the above needs, the CIBC core offers the largest and most comprehensive biomarker screens currently feasible.”
Gul Zerze
After receiving a $2M CPRIT Recruitment of First-Time Tenure Track Faculty Members award, Gul Zerze joined UH as an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering in 2022. Zerze’s research focuses on cancer-relevant proteins whose behavior cannot be understood from static molecular structures alone. Her lab develops physics-based and data-driven platforms to understand how biomolecules organize, interact and assemble inside cells, with the long-term goal of enabling the design and discovery of novel materials, drugs and diagnostics to improve human health.
"This work advances a fundamental, physics-based understanding of cancer biology while building computational tools that may ultimately help identify new strategies for therapeutic intervention,” said Zerze.
Ming Hu
At the UH College of Pharmacy, a $1.4M CPRIT grant is supporting the fight against familial adenomatous polyposis, a devastating and rare genetic disorder of the gastrointestinal tract that affects children, adolescents and young adults. Currently there is no medication for FAP, which causes hundreds to thousands of polyps in the colon and rectum and progresses to colon cancer unless treated with early surgical removal of the colon.
Ming Hu, Diana S-L. Chow Endowed Professor of Drug Discovery and Development, and Gregory Cuny, Joseph P. & Shirley Shipman Buckley Endowed Professor of Drug Discovery, are leading the effort to design new drugs to battle FAP, ones that will inhibit the activity of COX-2, an enzyme involved in the inflammatory process, in specific local areas of the body without affecting the entire body. The goal is to prevent the development of polyps and cancer in patients.
Lorra Garey
Lorra Garey, research associate professor of psychology, is using her $1.2M CPRIT grant to extend the trials of smoking cessation intervention by integrating approach bias retraining (ABR) with standard smoking cessation treatment.
"Smoking remains a significant contributor to preventable cancer-related deaths, with current cessation interventions demonstrating limited efficacy,” said Garey. “Our research builds upon a solid foundation of previous studies which demonstrated significantly higher short-term abstinence rates when ABR was integrated into standard smoking cessation treatment.”
Wei Gao
Also accelerating advancements in cancer prevention and cures, Wei Gao, assistant professor of pharmacology, received a $900,000 CPRIT grant to develop a new and stronger immunotherapy for pancreatic and lung cancer.
"Pancreatic and lung cancer remain exceptionally deadly because they create an environment that shields tumors from our immune system," said Dr. Gao. "Our goal is to tear down this barrier and empower the body's immune system to destroy the cancer."
Qin Feng
With $250,000 in CPRIT funding, Qin Feng, associate professor of biology and biochemistry, is working to stop the progression of prostate cancer, the most common non-skin cancer affecting men in the United States.
Her research goal is to provide a new treatment option for prostate cancer patients, especially those resistant to current therapies.
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