Three research projects have won the University of Tennessee’s 2017 Collaborative Research Network Awards in Cancer Research. The monetary awards are designed to promote new lines of team-based research and collaborative partnerships among cancer investigators across the UT System in hopes these projects will ultimately draw external funding.

After T. Allen Pannell Jr., a business doctoral student, lost his wife to a recurrence of breast cancer, he put his analytical skills to work to help doctors determine which course of treatment would be most effective for women battling a certain type of breast cancer.

He collaborated with Russell L. Zaretzki, associate professor of business analytics in UT’s Haslam College of Business, and Timothy J. Panella, a medical oncologist at the UT Medical Center, on research that indicates a correlation between the life expectancy of metastatic breast cancer patients and a treatment plan based on primary tumor receptors rather than metastatic tumors.

Increasingly, scientific discovery is driven by researchers coming together from diverse disciplines to solve complex problems.