By Andrea Frye

Lung cancer is often associated with cigarette smoking or second-hand smoke, but that smoke is not always what claims a life.

There were 107,416 men and 89,271 women diagnosed with lung cancer in 2005, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Web site, but each year people are diagnosed with cancer that contains no link to smoking. 

Kim Seibert, a wife and mother from Prospect, Ky., was one of those cases.

In 2007, Seibert lost her battle with a drug-resistant form of cancer, but she left behind a legacy of awareness in the Kim Massengill Seibert Memorial Fund Award in conjunction with the organization Uniting Against Lung Cancer, according to a UK news release.

The impact of Seibert’s death was felt not only by those who knew her, but also by the entire UK Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences.  

Esther Black, pharmacogeneticist and assistant professor in UK’s Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, was awarded a $100,000 grant from the Kim Massengill Seibert Memorial Fund Award. 

“The role of a pharmacogeneticist in research is to understand the contribution of several genes or the entire genome to an outcome of interest,” Black said. “In our lab, we are interested in the role of the genes that are important for cell signaling pathways in non-small cell lung cancer.”

The Kim Massengill Seibert Memorial Fund Award is helping Black and her lab to study the genes in the lung cancer that Seibert had. Black said the grant money will bused “to find specific cell signaling pathways that can be inhibited alone or together that will prevent a lung tumor from continuing to grow.”

Black said she believes  this project holds a very high level of importance to UK and Kentucky, but also to herself. 

It is a task Black said she wanted to tackle because of its significance as a health issue to Kentucky. 

“This state leads the nation in incidence and mortality from lung cancer,” Black said. “It is important then to attempt to accelerate the movement of potential therapies from the lab to the clinic.”

The Seibert family created the memorial fund to help other non-smokers with cancer to fight the disease, according to the Uniting Against Lung Cancer Web site.

Black said she hopes to do that for the family and others who suffer from this form of cancer.  

“I hope that the Seibert’s realize that their donation to research in the name of Mrs. Seibert will provide funds for continued study of a deadly disease for which no cure is known,” Black said. “We hope that through this project we can contribute to a better understanding of the biology of lung cancer and perhaps new treatment paradigms.”