The Sun Yat-sen University Cancer Center has been honored for its great achievements at the Chinese Anti-Cancer Association (CACA) Science and Technology Awards ceremony.

For the excellent work in the research of “Strategies for overcoming ABC-transporters-mediated multidrug resistance (MDR) of tumor cells”, Prof. Li-wu Fu’s team gained the first prize (ranked first). The project titled “Targeting Aurora-A kinase in cancer therapy” accomplished by Prof. Qiang Liu’s group won second prize (ranked second). Apart from these, “< > multicenter study of Sentinel lymph node biopsy replacing traditional axillary lymph node dissection in breast cancer patients” with the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hospital being a participant, was also awarded the second prize (ranked seventh).

Every two years, the CACA will form a Judging Panel comprising experts from the relevant fields of science and technology to assess the entries before making nominations to CACA for further consideration. The competition is very intense just at the same level as that for the “Guangdong Provincial Science and Technology Progress Award” and “Dingying Science Award”. In 2011, the winners for 30 awards (4 first prizes, 11 second prizes and 15 third prizes) were decided by vote. All of the three projects nominated by SYSU Cancer Center passed the initial evaluation by professional accreditation group. In the end, the research projects led by Prof. Li-wu Fu and Prof. Qiang Liu won the first and second prize respectively.

Among the 142 papers published in the research project of “Strategies for overcoming ABC transporters-mediated multidrug resistance (MDR) of tumor cells”, up to 73 papers were accepted by high-quality SCI journals, including Cancer Res (5 articles), Mol Med, Cell Cycle, Eur J Cancer (2 articles), Mol Pharmaceu (2 articles), Mol Cancer Ther, Birth J Parmacol, Biochem Pharmacol (4 articles), Mol Pharmacol, and 6 invention patents were attained.

The findings in the study of “Targeting Aurora-A kinase in cancer therapy” elucidate biological characteristics of the tumor cells and the molecular mechanisms of anti-cancer therapy, which will provide important guidance in clinical individualized targeted therapy based on tumor molecular typing. In this project, Prof. Liu’s group has published 11 papers in well-known scientific journals (including 7 papers with IF>5 and total of 707 citations), and trained more than 20 graduate students and 2 post-doctorals.