Glasscock Awarded Grant to Continue Prostate Cancer Metastasis Research

Quick Facts

The $25,000 Hemby Cancer Research Foundation grant will allow Glasscock to purchase supplies for her project.

Glasscock has researched the molecular causes of prostate cancer metastasis for 11 years.

Laura Glasscock

ROCK HILL, S.C. - Laura Glasscock, associate professor of biology, has been awarded a $25,000 research grant from the Hemby Cancer Research Foundation to support her ongoing research on the molecular causes of prostate cancer metastasis.

Funded through Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte, N.C., the grant will support Glasscock’s ongoing research project titled “Role of the Thrombomodulin-Protein C System in Prostate Cancer Metastasis,” allowing her to purchase supplies including tissue culture reagents, prostate cancer cell lines and the reagents needed to conduct the experiments. The grant will continue through Oct. 13, 2009. Glasscock currently has release time for research from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) INBRE grant at Winthrop, which allows her to work on this project in the Dalton Hall Life Sciences Building laboratories and to write grant proposals. The research grant will supply money to help support these projects.

Glasscock also works closely with five undergraduate students and two graduate students, testing different proteins to determine which ones increase and decrease cancer cell invasion. Collaborating with students, she said, provides “a different perspective” and “creative thinking” about problems that arise inside the lab.

For Glasscock, the grant represents recognition for 11 years of work and research on what proteins and other molecules cause prostate cancer to spread into other areas such as the lymph nodes, bone or the brain. She said she became interested in prostate cancer research during her work as a postdoctoral fellow and assistant director of urology research at the Cannon Research Center of Carolinas Medical Center.

“It is like figuring out a huge puzzle, and each year I solve one more piece of that puzzle – figuring out how proteins enable tumor cells to invade,” Glasscock said, adding that she will spend her “entire career on this project.”

A native of Greensboro, N.C., Glasscock earned her B.S. in biology at Salem College in Winston-Salem, N.C., and her Ph.D. in experimental pathology at UNC-Chapel Hill.

[Back to Previous Page]