Hormel Institute researchers have received a big grant toward researching rare cancers.

Dr. Sergio Gradilone, leader of the Cancer Cell Biology & Translational Research section at The Hormel Institute, has received a five-year, $1.7 million grant from the National Cancer Institute to fund research on cholangiocarcinoma or CCA. The grant starts today and runs through 2020.

CCA — often labeled a “silent disease” due to symptoms many times going unnoticed until it is in the advanced stage — starts in the bile duct, a thin tube that reaches from the liver to the small intestine. The bile duct’s main function is to move fluid called bile from the liver and gallbladder to the small intestine, where it helps digest food.

This is a significant project, Gradilone said, because there is a vital need to find new targets of CCA leading to better therapeutic strategies for this lethal form of cancer. His team is focusing on the role played during tumor formation by primary cilia, which are multisensory organelles that act similar to a cell antenna in that they sense and receive signals from the environment surrounding the cells.

Researchers are also hopeful the project’s discoveries potentially could be applied to other liver diseases and other forms of cancer, such as breast, kidney, pancreatic and prostate cancers.

“We believe our study will provide a link between primary cilia loss and tumor progression in CCA,” Gradilone said. “We also hope it lays the foundation for potentially developing anti-cancer therapeutics based on rescuing cilia’s architecture and function.”

Gradilone joined The Hormel Institute in fall 2014 after doing research at Mayo Clinic in Rochester. His lab focuses on understanding the basic biological processes involved with a normal cell transforming into a cancerous one. Better understanding these mechanisms then could lead to improved cancer treatment options.