This year’s Cancer Grand Challenge Summit was held in Boston, Massachusetts, on March 5-7th, 2025 for the announcement of the new teams of researchers that were selected to receive funding for cancer research. The Cancer Grand Challenge, founded by Cancer Research UK and the NIH National Cancer Institute, has a mission to “empower the global research community to come together, to think differently and to solve cancer’s toughest challenges, to transform outcomes for people affected by cancer.”
NEXUS Co-Collaborator Randolph Singh, PhD, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, also presented on the work that the Columbia group has done as a part of the SAMBAI (Social, Ancestry, Molecular and Biological Analysis of Inequalities) Cancer Grand Challenge team which is led by Melissa Davis, PhD, Morehouse School of Medicine.
SAMBAI was a 2024 Cancer Grand Challenge awardee, and brings together a multidisciplinary team of researchers and institutions across the United States, United Kingdom, and Africa in an effort to “decode the factors that cause and influence disparate cancer outcomes in underserved populations of African descent.”
Dr. Miller’s team at Columbia University will lead the SAMBAI “Work Package 2” to conduct exposomics analysis using high-resolution mass spectrometry to collect data on thousands of exogenous and endogenous molecules to identify risk factors relevant to these populations.
In March, Dr. Miller and Singh presented their work as part of SAMBAI at the 3rd International Meeting of the Pan African Cancer Research Institute ( PACRI).