J. Bart Rose, M.D., MAS, an associate professor in the Department of Surgery, is a spring 2025 O’Neal Invests awardee, along with his research partners Benjamin Larimer, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Department of Radiology, and Michael Niederweis, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Microbiology.
The Breast Cancer Research Foundation of Alabama (BCRFA) will be providing funding through the UAB O’Neal Comprehensive Cancer Center’s O’Neal Invests Cancer Research Grants program. Started in 2020, O’Neal Invests supports and funds UAB cancer scientists’ research in cancer prevention and care.
The funding will support Rose, Larimer and Niederweis’s research on “Validation and rapid detection of calreticulin as a cancer biomarker.”
Rose, a faculty member, surgeon and researcher in the Division of Surgical Oncology, has recently been awarded a grant by the American Cancer Society to study calreticulin as focus in improving cancer therapies.
Calreticulin, or CALR, is a protein found in the cell that plays important roles in immune responses and cancer development. Rose and other researchers have found that CALR can be moved to the surface of cancer cells with medication, allowing the cancerous cell to be directly targeted with therapeutic interventions. This has the potential to increase treatment efficacy and enhance survival rates.
“This funding will help us build on our current understanding of calreticulin with the goal of making cancer therapies more efficient and effective,” Rose said. “We’re thankful to the BCRFA for this generous award.”
One of the principal investigators at the Neuroendocrine Cancer Research Laboratory, Rose has over 20 years of experience in scientific research. He has made significant research findings in the fields of molecular genetics, enzymology, oncologic biomarkers and clinical outcomes. His current research focuses on biomarkers and mechanisms of cancer development in the liver, pancreas, bile duct, small bowel and stomach - with a particular focus on neuroendocrine tumors.