Jackson State University is pleased to announce that Dr. Clement G. Yedjou, Assistant Professor of Biology and CSET-Distance Learning Coordinator, has been selected to join forces with more than 350 cancer researchers from prominent research institutions in 31 countries to tackle cancer’s complexity.
The initiative is called “The Halifax Project” and involves two separate task forces. One task force will take what has been learned about cancer’s complexity to design an entirely new approach to therapy, while the other will assess whether or not everyday exposures to mixtures of commonly encountered chemicals have a role to play in cancer causation.
This collaborative international initiative is being led by a non-governmental organization called Getting to Know Cancer. Within the project, Yedjou will be working on one of 12 cross-functional teams of scientists that will each be focused on a different aspect of cancer biology. The task force will spend the next year reviewing what we now know about cancer’s complexity and they intend to study the risks associated with everyday exposures to mixtures of commonly encountered chemicals.
“Although we have learned a lot about the risks associated with certain individual chemicals that are now known to be carcinogens, we know surprisingly little about the cancer risks that might be attributable to the combined effects of the many chemicals that we encounter in our everyday lives,” said David O. Carpenter, M.D., Director, Institute for Health and the Environment at the University at Albany, State University of New York. “This project is a very positive step forward because we are still learning about the many factors associated with the cause of the disease.”
Getting to Know Cancer is based in Nova Scotia, Canada. It was launched in 2011 with a mission is to instigate applied integrative cancer research. The organization’s inception was inspired by a number of cancer-related deaths in the families of the two cofounders, and they have since been focused on finding ways to address a number of systemic barriers that they believe are slowing down the progress of cancer research. For more information, click here.