The AACR-Conquer Cancer Foundation of ASCO Young Investigator Award for Translational Cancer Research provides funding to physician-scientists to encourage and promote quality research in clinical oncology.

2024 Grantee

Research

Breast cancer stands out among epithelial malignancies due to its distinct genomic landscape, which is characterized by a high degree of structural variation and genomic instability. These genomic changes produce nucleotide sequences that are highly specific to cancer cells; occasionally in the form of expressed fusion RNAs. Dr. Priedigkeit will merge advances in genomic discovery and gene therapy to better define the landscape of fusion RNAs in metastatic breast cancer and credential novel gene therapy approaches to exploit these sequences as recruitment biomolecules for cytotoxic payload delivery.

Biography

Dr. Priedigkeit received his medical and doctoral degrees (MD/PhD) from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. His thesis applied translational genomics to discover acquired molecular dependencies in metastatic breast cancers. He is currently a medical oncology fellow at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and a postdoctoral scholar at the Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard. In his clinical practice, he sees patients with breast cancer. His research aims to merge computational and genomic sciences with technology development to improve how we understand and treat advanced cancers.

Acknowledgment of Support

“The AACR-Conquer Cancer, the ASCO Foundation Young Investigator Award for Translational Cancer Research will help catalyze my development as an independent physician scientist focused on applying genomic technologies to improve how we care for patients with advanced malignancies.”

2022 grantee

Research

An emerging immunotherapy approach involves the use of T cells engineered to express a T cell receptor (TCR) with defined specificity against oncofetal antigens (developmental proteins expressed by tumors but not by healthy, post-natal tissue). The development of this approach, however, has been largely limited by the difficulty in isolating high-affinity TCRs that target oncofetal antigens. This is because oncofetal antigens are non-mutated self-peptides, and thus inherently less immunogenic. Dr. Long is poised to use fundamentals of central tolerance and T cell development to create novel methods that will redefine how the field identifies high-affinity cancer-specific TCRs, and specifically identify high-affinity TCRs with a strong potential for clinical translation in the treatment of Ewing sarcoma.

Biography

 Dr. Long received her BS and MD from Northwestern University, and her PhD while working at the NIH. For her thesis, she was the first to define T cell exhaustion as a major limiter of CAR efficacy. She completed a pediatrics residency at Boston Children’s Hospital and a hematology/oncology fellowship at Stanford. As a pediatric oncologist, she is developing novel immunotherapies for children with cancer. She is also an instructor at Stanford University, where she continues her postdoctoral research on how thymic selection, designed to prevent autoimmunity, may contribute to poor antitumor immunity in children.

 Acknowledgment of Support

The generous support of the AACR-Conquer Cancer Foundation of ASCO will be instrumental in helping me become an independent physician-scientist who translates novel immunotherapies into the clinic. Their funding also highlights the importance of developing immunotherapies for pediatric solid tumors, and provides the necessary support towards making this a reality.