A University of Hawaii faculty member has won a $50,000 cancer research grant.

The university’s Cancer Center said Thursday Andrea Fleig is this year’s recipient of the Weinman Innovator Award.

Fleig is a faculty member in the center’s cancer biology program and director of research and development at The Queen’s Medical Center.

The grant is to support research to develop new diagnostic or therapeutic approaches to cancer. 

Fleig’s proposal was based on her laboratory’s discovery of the critical role of a unique magnesium-transporting protein in the regulation of cell growth and proliferation.