V Foundation Awards $1 Million Grant to UH Cancer Center for BAP1 Mesothelioma Research

The V Foundation for Cancer Research awarded a $1 million grant to the University of Hawaii Cancer Center to support a five-year study of mesothelioma in people who carry inherited mutations in the BAP1 gene. The award, announced April 14, 2026, is part of the foundation’s All-Star Translational Award program and will fund research led by Drs. Michele Carbone and Haining Yang.

The study builds on two decades of work at the center tracking families with germline BAP1 mutations, a subset of mesothelioma cases that behave differently from the aggressive, asbestos-related form of the disease.

The Researchers and the Focus

Carbone and Yang lead one of the longest-running programs focused on BAP1 biology in cancer. Carbone directed the UH Cancer Center from 2008 to 2014 and helped guide its transition to National Cancer Institute designation. Yang, also a professor at the center, collaborates on the lab’s work connecting BAP1 function to tumor metabolism, hypoxia, and the behavior of HMGB1, a protein tied to mineral fiber exposure.

The new five-year project asks a question the lab’s earlier findings raised but did not fully answer: why do tumors in people with inherited BAP1 mutations tend to grow slowly and stay contained, rather than invade surrounding tissues the way sporadic, asbestos-driven mesothelioma does?

The study will examine how BAP1 interacts with the cellular machinery that normally lets cancer cells invade and spread, with the goal of finding targets that could slow invasion in other cancers too. The All-Star Translational program requires that funded work be positioned to affect patient care within three years, through clinical trials, biomarkers, or diagnostic tools.

Carbone, Yang, and Ian Pagano previously received a 2012 V Foundation grant titled HMGB1: A Biomarker for Mineral Fiber Exposure and Detection of Malignant Mesothelioma. The All-Star program is reserved for researchers who have held prior V Foundation awards and are extending that work into new translational directions.

Why Hawaii

Hawaii’s mesothelioma burden is not the largest in the country in absolute terms. State health data recorded 139 mesothelioma deaths between 1999 and 2017, and the state ranks near the bottom nationally for mesothelioma mortality. But the disease has a specific and well-documented footprint in Hawaii that shaped the research program at the UH Cancer Center.

Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard was a major source of asbestos exposure from the 1930s through the early 1980s. A 1985 University of Hawaii study of more than 8,000 shipyard workers found an increased occurrence of mesothelioma, including in workers with low or indirect exposure. A later 1994 analysis reported Pearl Harbor shipyard workers were approximately 10 times more likely to develop mesothelioma than the general population. That local epidemiology gave Hawaii’s cancer researchers sustained contact with the disease and its families.

The center’s BAP1 work expanded from those roots. Carbone and Yang’s team has studied affected families in Louisiana, Wisconsin, and Turkey, and later in Native Hawaiian, Japanese, and Jewish communities, looking for the inherited mutations that appeared in people with no meaningful asbestos history. That research culminated in the identification of low-grade BAP1-associated mesothelioma, a variant that responds to surgery and chemotherapy in ways asbestos-driven mesothelioma typically does not.

The same cohort of BAP1 families anchors the new V Foundation project.

V Foundation Track Record at the Center

The V Foundation was founded in 1993 by ESPN and the family of basketball coach Jim Valvano. Its All-Star Translational Award funds high-risk, high-reward bench-to-bedside cancer research, with a requirement that each project include a biostatistics plan and a path to patient impact within three years.

Eligibility is restricted to scientists who previously held a V Scholar, Translational, or Game-Changer award in good standing. The 2012 HMGB1 grant placed Carbone and Yang inside that pipeline, and the new $1 million All-Star award builds directly on it.

The funding pattern is notable for mesothelioma, a disease that receives a small share of federal cancer research dollars relative to its mortality. Between 2,000 and 3,300 new mesothelioma cases are diagnosed in the United States each year, and only two new FDA-approved therapies have reached the market since 2000. Sustained foundation support for a single laboratory over more than a decade is uncommon, and it allows the kind of long-horizon family tracking that BAP1 research requires.

What the Grant Does Not Fund

The announcement describes a translational study of BAP1 carriers and the mechanisms behind their tumors’ slower invasion. It does not announce a specific clinical trial, a new drug, or a named therapy. Readers looking for treatment options for BAP1-related mesothelioma should speak with their oncology team and, where relevant, a genetic counselor. Clinical trials for mesothelioma, including studies relevant to BAP1 biology, are tracked on ClinicalTrials.gov.

For families with a known BAP1 mutation, the UH Cancer Center and the National Cancer Institute have collaborated on screening protocols that cover the other cancers associated with the gene, including melanoma, kidney cancer, breast cancer, and liver cancer. Roughly 45% of BAP1 carriers in the published family cohorts developed more than one cancer type during follow-up.