The AACR NextGen Grants for Transformative Cancer Research represent the AACR’s flagship funding initiative to stimulate highly innovative research from young investigators. This grant mechanism is intended to promote and support creative, paradigm-shifting cancer research that may not be funded through conventional channels. The research can be in any area of basic, translational, or clinical science.

2023 grantee

Research

The bone microenvironment plays an important role in breast cancer progression. In previous studies, Dr. Bado and colleagues identified a central role of osteogenic cells in mediating epigenetic reprogramming in bone metastasis. This process was associated with therapeutic resistance and metastasis progression. In this project, Dr. Bado’s team will profile and investigate pro-survival niches during bone metastasis using multiplex imaging and transcriptomic approaches.

Biography

Dr. Bado completed his doctorate at the University of Houston, where he worked on tumor suppressive mechanisms of estrogen receptor ß in breast cancer. He then joined Baylor College of Medicine where he worked on dissecting the interplay between osteogenic cells and cancer cells during bone metastasis progression as a postdoctoral fellow, and subsequently, as an instructor.  He is now an assistant professor in the Department of Oncological Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. His lab works on epigenetic plasticity and multi-organ metastasis in breast cancer.

Acknowledgement of Support

“Being a recipient of the Breast Cancer Research Foundation-AACR NextGen Grants for Transformative Cancer Research is a true honor for me. It is a reminder that I don’t stand alone as a young investigator in the fight against cancer. This grant will allow my team to study highly complex mechanisms associated with bone metastasis.”

2020 Grantees

Research
Using novel patient-derived organoid models of metastatic colorectal cancer, Dr. Ganesh’s group recently demonstrated that disseminating colorectal cancers (CRC) undergo a dynamic phenotypic switch from a tumor initiating cancer stem cell state to a distinct metastasis stem cell (MetSC) state that is required for metastasis initiation and therapy resistance. In this project, she is set to integrate transcriptomic and epigenetic analyses of patient samples with mechanistic dissection in cutting-edge patient-derived organoid models and orthotopic transplantation mouse models of metastatic colorectal cancer.

Biography
Dr. Ganesh received her MD/PhD from the University of Cambridge/MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. She trained in internal medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and in medical oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where she completed a postdoctoral fellowship. Her laboratory studies mechanisms of regenerative plasticity in metastasis. A physician-scientist, she is currently an assistant member at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in the Molecular Pharmacology Program and Gastrointestinal Oncology Service.

Acknowledgment of Support
I am deeply honored to have been selected as a 2020 AACR NextGen Grant for Transformative Cancer Research recipient. This grant will provide critical funds to enable us to pursue an ambitious program of research to better understand and treat advanced cancers.

Research
Modulation of T cell metabolism represents a promising strategy to augment responses to immunotherapy. Leveraging new methods that they’ve developed, Dr. Spitzer and his lab members will quantify metabolic adaptations along with markers of T cell differentiation and function at the single-cell level. Through parallel studies in mouse models and primary patient biospecimens, they seek to understand the metabolic requirements of T cells during tumor eradication.

Biography
Dr. Spitzer completed his graduate training in immunology at Stanford University, where he developed experimental and analytical methods to model the state of the immune system and immune responses to cancer using high dimensional single-cell data. He then moved to UCSF as a Parker Fellow and a Sandler Faculty Fellow, where he is currently an assistant professor in the Departments of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery and of Microbiology & Immunology, as well as an investigator of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy and the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub.

Acknowledgment of Support
I am so appreciative for the support of our work through a 2020 AACR NextGen Grant for Transformative Cancer Research. This grant will provide essential funds and resources to achieve our goal of improving immunotherapy for breast cancer through a deeper understanding of T cell metabolic function.

Research
Dr. Borniger aims to investigate how mammary tumors in the periphery reshape neuronal activity across the entire brain to alter sleep/wake behavior. In addition, he aims to test the role these neuronal ensembles play in the tumor’s ability to evade the immune system and modulate systemic physiology. He is set to map how tumor development (premalignancy to malignancy and metastasis) alters brain-wide neural activity, using light-sheet tomography to visualize cFos expression and distribution throughout the entire brain in an unbiased fashion. Then, his team plans to use scRNA-seq to “trap” and transcriptionally profile activated neurons. Finally, using optogenetics they will examine how manipulation of these circuits alters the intra-tumor immune response and sleep/wake behavior.

Biography
Dr. Borniger completed a PhD in neuroscience at The Ohio State University, focusing on distal communication between breast cancer and the brain. He completed a BRAIN Initiative postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University, where he applied cutting-edge techniques to assess neural circuit activity in mouse models of cancer. He is currently is an assistant professor with dual appointments in the neuroscience and cancer divisions at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

Acknowledgment of Support
This award provides essential funding for my laboratory as an early stage investigator. This support will allow my group to tackle pressing questions regarding the basic biology of breast cancer by using a suite of systems neuroscience techniques, with the ultimate goal of identifying targets for validation or preventative therapy.

2019 Grantees

Research
Given the paucity of somatic coding mutations in pediatric cancer, abnormally expressed genes may be important biomarkers of response to targeted therapies in pediatric tumors. To detect such genes, Dr. Vaske had previously developed a comparative RNA-Seq analysis approach in which a single patient’s data is compared to similar data from over 11,000 cancer patients to identify over-expressed genes (gene expression outliers). In this project, Dr. Vaske is identifying recurrent gene expression outliers in pediatric primary tumors and cancer models and investigating the molecular mechanisms of the aberrant expression. This work can thus demonstrate the utility of comparative RNA-Seq analysis and provide rationale for incorporating RNA-Seq-defined markers into precision medicine studies for pediatric cancer patients.

Biography
Dr. Vaske earned her PhD in pediatric cancer bioinformatics from the University of British Columbia. She completed a post-doctoral fellowship at UC Santa Cruz and a clinical molecular genetics fellowship at UC San Francisco. She is also a fellow of the Canadian College of Medical Geneticists. She is an assistant professor of molecular, cell, and developmental biology at the University of California Santa Cruz, where she holds the Colligan Presidential Chair in Pediatric Genomics. Her research focuses on translational genomics of pediatric cancers.

Acknowledgement of Support
I am very honored to receive the prestigious AACR-NextGen Grant for Transformative Cancer Research and am deeply grateful for the support. This grant enables me to develop a molecular biology program that will evaluate findings from my bioinformatics analysis and contribute to their translation in the pediatric cancer clinic.