Alberto Ciccia Wins Cancer Research Grant from the Mary Kay Foundation

Alberto Ciccia, PhD, has been awarded a new grant from the Mary Kay Foundation to support his work in advancing breast cancer research.

The grants, totaling $1.2 million, are awarded annually to leading research institutions in the United States conducting innovative translational research to better understand cancers that affect women. Ten research institutions were selected this year out of a pool of 75. Mary Kay will be funding Dr. Ciccia’s project to investigate how BRCA1/2 mutations drive breast and ovarian cancer.

An associate professor of genetics and development at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and a member of the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center (HICCC), Dr. Ciccia focuses on genetic and biochemical approaches to determine how defects in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes cause genome instability and predispose to breast and ovarian cancer. His lab also studies the pathways that repair DNA lesions induced by genome editing technologies.

One in three women are diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime, and this year alone more than 900,000 women are expected to be diagnosed, according to the American Cancer Society. The Mary Kay Foundation has donated over $30 million, since 1996, to research, programs, and to support clinical trials for cancers affecting women.