Growth of a critical mass of investigators: Our Center was funded in 2018. The Center began with two senior faculty (Lockman and Gibson) and five junior Project Leaders. We have seen significant growth in the number of CoBRE associated TME researchers.
- Faculty growth (7 to 27) has been nearly four-fold over the last eight years. The CoBRE has been heavily engaged in faculty recruiting, which initially brought in four very strong external candidates to WVU (Busada, Hu, Liu and Bobbala). The CoBRE extended this work to recruit Abbots, Bolino and Walker Evidence of faculty growth has been the ability of the CoBRE to engage with a significant number of Departments and Schools (Table 1).
- External scientific input growth: We have intentionally increased the breadth of our Center beyond West Virginia through External Mentors and our External Advisory Committee. All 17 PLs have formed mentoring teams consisting of two internal mentors and an external mentor with relevant scientific expertise. Additionally, we chose three TME experts who offered to serve; Dr. Danny Welch who has a scientific record in the TME and overseeing programs, Dr. Jonni Moore who has expertise in developing and managing core facilities, and Dr. Pruett is a CoBRE PI, with immunology expertise.
Table 1:
WVU School of Medicine (Departments of Immunology, Biochemistry, and Human Performance)
WVU School of Pharmacy (Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences)
WVU Medicine (Departments of Oncology, Surgery, and Neurosurgery)
WVU Cancer Institute (Department of Medical Oncology)
Statler College of Engineering (Department of Biomedical Engineering)
Peer-reviewed publications: The bottom panel of Fig 1 highlights the growth of peer-reviewed publications (#227 to date) since formation of the Center. Of note we have seen a thirty-fold growth in Center publication productivity while over the same time-period we experienced a four-fold growth in faculty. Increased productivity is attributed to additional trainees in the laboratories and the improved grant award success of the PLs beyond the CoBRE. With regard to publications, it is positive that we have had a total of 222 publications as of April 2026 that have cited the CoBRE in the eight year period since the award. The cited publications are associated with PLs, Pilot awardees, faculty using cores, as well as TME administrative faculty.
Detailed data for active and past researchers can be found at this link for further review.
Dr. Wei Du and her team of researchers were recently awarded a $100,000 grant from the Leukemia Research Foundation to investigate a method for increasing the effectiveness of stem cell transplantation. Read the full news release. Congratulations Dr. Du!
