Collegiate Times

Construction continues on the joint Virginia Tech-Carilion Medical School in Roanoke that will accept its first class in 2010.

One project that the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute is funding through a seed grant focuses on ovarian cancer.

Eva Schmelz, a human nutrition, food, and exercise associate professor, is one of the primary researchers on this project.

"We are working on detecting ovarian cancer," Schmelz said. "We are also going to look at and examine the changes in gene expression in the cancerous tissue."

"Our plan is to establish a collaboration with the doctors and physicians at Carilion," Schmelz said. "They are going to, over the next few years, provide us with tissue that we can archive and examine over an extended period of time."

Schmelz said that her team will be examining cancerous tissue at the early and late stages, looking at the interaction of the disease over time.

"We will use the archived tissue for our research," Schmelz said. "With this tissue we hope to develop a type of tissue bank for future use in projects."

To apply for the seed grant, Schmelz said that her team wrote a grant proposal, hoping for the best.

"We wrote the proposal about a month ago," Schmelz said. "You can never be sure if you are going to receive the grant, but our chances were about 40 percent that we would get it, so that was encouraging."

Schmelz is required to use the initial seed money within the first year of her research project, but after that, she hopes to continue working on her research with Carilion Health.

"We will work on and finish our proposed project within the first year," Schmelz said. "We hope to continue to collect tissue samples over a long-term period. We want to develop this project for other researchers, too, so that they can use the information that we have found to aid them in their research as well, because it is really difficult for other researchers to try and obtain this type of cancerous tissue."

The funding period for the seed grant is 12 months, and it will run out after that, Boyd said.

"The way research works is that people ask questions, and then receive responses to those questions, which end up generating more questions," Boyd said. "Those questions end up snowballing into these big projects between Carilion and Virginia Tech."

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