NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – The US Department of Defense has awarded Boston University Medical School a $13.6 million grant to lead a multi-site study to discover molecular biomarkers that can be used for the early detection of lung cancer.

The five-year study will seek to identify markers that could help physicians decide which patients require biopsies after having CT scans and could predict which smokers who had no abnormalities in their CT scans will be most likely to get lung cancer.

The collaborators on the project will include military hospitals and Veteran’s Affairs centers across the country, as well as researchers at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Brown University, and the University of California, Los Angeles.