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Bolstered by two recent multiyear grants, Matthew C.T. Hartman, Ph.D., and his team are fighting cancer at the molecular level as part of their work in chemical biology, a field that bridges two scientific disciplines to develop new medicines.

"These grants will enable us to develop new technologies to speed up the discovery of new drugs for cancer and other diseases,” said Hartman, a member of the Developmental Therapeutics research program at VCU Massey Comprehensive Cancer Center and a professor in the Department of Chemistry in the VCU College of Humanities and Sciences. The grants were awarded in 2025.

The first project targets proteins implicated in cancer and other diseases that have been termed undruggable due to the difficulty in finding molecules that can easily engage the proteins inside cells. Supported by a five-year, $1.6 million award from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, Hartman’s lab hopes to help researchers create molecules—with the help of an engineered genetic code—that can be developed into drugs that combat the challenging proteins.

This MIRA grant – a Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award – supports research that advances the institute’s mission: increasing the understanding of biological processes and laying the foundation for advances in disease diagnosis, treatment and prevention.

With a separate two-year R21 award from the National Cancer Institute, Hartman’s lab is collaborating with researchers at Northwestern University to develop a technology to more quickly determine the 3D structures of certain shape-shifting proteins that are involved in cancer. Understanding how these proteins alter their shapes will enable other scientists to initiate the development of new drugs that treat cancer, with specific implications for a genetic driver of the childhood cancer Ewing sarcoma.

This was repurposed from an article originally published by VCU News.