Zheng’s cancer research lands MERIT Award

Vanderbilt cancer epidemiologist Wei Zheng, M.D., Ph.D., M.P.H., has received a MERIT Award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for his research on women and cancer.

The MERIT (Method to Extend Research in Time) awards provide long-term support to investigators with impressive records of scientific achievement in research areas of special importance or promise. Fewer than 5 percent of NIH-funded investigators are selected to receive MERIT awards, which provide financial support for up to 10 years without competitive review.

Zheng’s MERIT award will support continuation of the Shanghai Women’s Health Study, a population-based study of 75,000 women who were recruited between 1997 and 2000 with a major focus to identify associations between diet and lifestyle and diseases such as cancer.

Zheng and his team are studying the impact of soy foods, tea, ginseng and cruciferous vegetables on cancer risk and health. The researchers also are conducting genome-wide association studies, scanning the entire genome for disease susceptibility biomarkers. They are studying telomeres, DNA copy number variations, prostaglandin metabolites and other biomarkers that may be important in cancer and other disease processes.

“One of our goals is to build a risk-assessment model for breast cancer that will allow us to identify those women at high risk for the disease for cost-effective prevention,” said Zheng, Ingram Professor of Cancer Research and director of the Vanderbilt Epidemiology Center.

“I am very excited to receive this award. It is a recognition of the teamwork involved in our research,” he said. “Epidemiological studies require a multidisciplinary team, and I am privileged to work with so many talented, dedicated people at Vanderbilt and many other institutions.”

– by Dagny Stuart