This is the tenth grant from the Joseph Drown Foundation to the center in 12 years, bringing the total the foundation has given to the center to more than $300,000.

In a letter to the center's director, Steven Oppenheimer, Wendy W. Schine, the foundation's vice president and program director, said the foundation's board of directors was pleased to see how well he "leveraged past funding from the Joseph Drown Foundation and, more importantly, inspired students to excel in the sciences. We remain proud to continue to support your work."

Oppenheimer said he was particularly happy to receive the grant from the Joseph Drown Foundation because it is one of the few organizations that supports pilot research projects.

"Almost no other agency will provide money for pilot studies," he said. "Even many of the federal agencies require you to have most of the work done before they will give you money. The support from the Joseph Drown Foundation has enabled us to then garner millions from other agencies for research it supported when they were just pilot projects."

Oppenheimer said CSUN's Center for Cancer and Developmental Biology's research focuses on how cells stick to one another at the molecular level, which is important for understanding how cancer cells spread throughout the body.

In one project, Oppenheimer and about 30 undergraduate and graduate students each semester have studied cell adhesion in sea urchins, which have a simple molecular system which can serve as a model for researchers in understanding how cells stick to one another. Those studies indicate that sugar-containing molecules play a critical role in the adhesion of cancer cells, at least in the sea urchins.

Oppenheimer said the center's more recent work focuses on examining the surfaces of human cancer cells. They have developed more than 100 different microscopic "beads" which have a specific molecule attached, such as sugar or amino acid. Oppenheimer and the students are taking human cancer cells and mixing them with the beads to see which cells stick to which beads.

"We are able to learn a lot about specific cell surface property and we have been able to come up with some clear cut differences in the surfaces of very closely related human cancer cell lines," he said.

The work could have an impact on how doctors treat cancer patients or in the development of drugs to fight cancer.

"What we do is basic clinical research, but there is a potential use for what we do," Oppenheimer said.

Oppenheimer and his students have published several papers on their work that have been well received by researchers around the country.

He said many of the students who work at the center then go on to get doctorates or medical degrees at some of the nation's most prestigious research universities.

"Being able to do research as an undergraduate student seems to be helping them get into the top programs in the country," he said.