UT Health San Antonio has been awarded $6 million in grant funding from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, which enabled the local institution to recruit a leading researcher and professor.
UT Health San Antonio is using the money — which was among $30 million across nine new grants awarded by CPRIT — to recruit Dr. Patrick Sung, professor of biophysics, biochemistry, therapeutic radiology and epidemiology at Yale University. He will occupy the Robert A. Welch Distinguished Chair in Chemistry at UT Health San Antonio and be appointed professor in the Department of Biochemistry & Structural Biology.
Sung will also be associate dean for research in the Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long School of Medicine and lead a new research program in genetic integrity at UT Health San Antonio’s Mays Cancer Center.
Dr. Robert Hromas, dean of the Long School of Medicine and vice president for medical affairs at UT Health San Antonio, said the CPRIT money was critical in the Alamo City’s ability to get someone of Sung's stature.
“We would not have recruited him without those funds,” Hromas told me.
Sung, a native of Hong Kong, is no stranger to Texas — or to San Antonio. His initial faculty appointment was at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.
In 1997, Sung moved to UT Health San Antonio as assistant professor and was promoted to professor and the Zachry Distinguished Professor of Molecular Medicine. From 2001 to 2003, he was co-director of a National Cancer Institute-funded training program in DNA repair at the university.
Sung left UT Health San Antonio in 2003 for Yale. One of the factors that attracted him back to the Alamo City is the opportunity to help expand UT Health San Antonio’s capabilities for taking bench research and translating it into human application. Sung plans to bring with him a lab team of more than a dozen people who will begin work at UT Health San Antonio in early 2019.
Dr. Ruben Mesa, director of the Mays Cancer Center, said Sung’s recruitment represents a strong commitment by that institution and UT Health San Antonio to “bring the most cutting-edge research and cancer care to San Antonio.”