August 26: Oberlin College Chemistry Professor Wins National Cancer Institute Award

Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur today announced that Dr. Rebecca Jean Whelan, an assistant professor of chemistry at Oberlin College, has received $345,000 from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) for research into detection and diagnosis of ovarian cancer.

"Congratulations to Dr. Whelan for winning this competitive grant," said Congresswoman Kaptur. "Ovarian cancer is the fifth most common cancer among women in the United States and claims approximately 15,000 lives each year.

"We're all rooting for Dr. Whelan and her team at Oberlin to learn how to detect this particularly deadly disease so that more women can survive."

Dr. Whelan will oversee a three-year research project titled, "Development of Aptamer-Based Detection and Therapy Strategies for Ovarian Cancer." Aptamers are molecules that bind to a specific target molecule and thus help facilitate research.

"The research that I'm engaged in now is invested in finding new ways of detecting ovarian cancer by looking at blood samples and searching within those blood samples for telltale indicators that the disease is present, even if it's at a very early stage," Dr. Whelan said in a video posted on the Oberlin College website, https://new.oberlin.edu.

Dr. Whelan's funding comes from the Academic Research Enhancement Awards (AREA) program that is administered by the National Cancer Institute (NCI).

The National Cancer Institute is part of the National Institutes of Health, which is one of 11 agencies that compose the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The NCI was established under the National Cancer Institute Act of 1937 and is the federal government's principal agency for cancer research and training.