Colleen’s Dream Foundation, a Scottsdale-based nonprofit, today announced a $30,000 grant to the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) to research new ways of treating ovarian cancer.

The grant will help fund research that builds on TGen’s discovery that mutations in a gene known as SMARCA4 drive a specific type of extremely aggressive ovarian cancer — Small Cell Carcinoma of the Ovary, Hypercalcemic Type (SCCOHT) — which most often affects girls and young women.

More than 20 years ago, a billboard in China piqued the interest of a chemical biologist. It endorsed an extract from the plant known as the “thunder god vine” as an immunosuppressant. A brief review of published research revealed that the extract’s key ingredient — the small molecule triptolide — had been identified 20 years before that billboard ad, and it could stop cells from multiplying.