Poised to reshape the future of cancer research

Dr Sarah Moody is a senior staff scientist based at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, UK. Sarah is part of the Mutographs Cancer Grand Challenges team, led by Professor Sir Mike Stratton. Her research focuses on analysing the patterns of mutations (mutational signatures) in cancer genomes.  

Hanifa Koguna is a junior neurosurgeon and PhD student at Imperial College London and the National Physical Laboratory, UK, working on multi-modal mapping of brain tumours for enhanced intra-operative margin delineation using mass spectrometry and confocal microscopy. Her research as part of the Rosetta team aims to improve surgical accuracy, pave the way for personalised diagnostic and therapeutic approaches in tackling brain tumours, and ultimately improve patient outcomes.

Dr Amy Schade, a member of the SPECIFICANCER team, is a postdoctoral research fellow in medicine at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital, US. Amy's research interest is in development of novel therapies for treatment of triple negative breast cancer.

Stefan Hutten is a finishing PhD student in the group of Professor Jos Jonkers at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam. He is part of the PRECISION consortium and in his PhD he focused on understanding the biology of ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) progression by creating mouse intraductal (MIND) patient-derived xenograft (PDX) models of DCIS. Additionally, he has been part of the Future Leaders committee since 2019 to create a platform for young researchers to develop within the Cancer Grand Challenges initiative.

Raquel Blanco is a bioinformatics predoctoral researcher at the Barcelona Biomedical Genomics Laboratory, Spain, led by Dr Núria López-Bigas. Raquel is part of team PROMINENT. Her research is focused on how mutant cells remain normal or evolve into cancer depending on their exposure to specific stimuli called cancer promoters. Her aim is to be able to decipher the molecular signatures of cancer promotion to inform prevention.

Dr Ignacio Vázquez-García is a Research Fellow in Computational Oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Columbia University, US, working with Dr Sohrab Shah and Dr Simon Tavaré. He is also part of the IMAXT team. He investigates somatic evolution in cancer, and its role in driving tumor progression, immune escape and therapeutic resistance. His current research focuses on understanding the impact of genomic instability on cancer evolution using single-cell genomics, in situ imaging and combining machine learning with clinical datasets. 

Dr Evi Karali is a senior research scientist at the Institute of Cancer Research in London, UK, in the Division of Cancer Biology and Metabolism. She is a member of the Rosetta Cancer Grand Challenges team. Her research is focused on exploring the role of metabolic reprogramming and oncogenic signalling in cancer progression, aiming to discover novel connections between metabolic signatures and tumour characteristics.

Shannon is a PhD student working on AI for digital pathology, specifically predicting breast cancer risk and outcome. 

Blake is a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Matthew Meyerson's lab at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He is interested in the host-microbe interactions of Fusobacterium nucleatum, specifically investigating the ability of Fusobacterium to invade the colon and its role in colorectal cancer. 

Jack is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Goncalves lab at Weill-Cornell Medicine. He is currently investigating the role of lung-derived secreted proteins in whole body metabolism and cancer cachexia.

Emma is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the CRUK Beaston Institute her research interests involve using pre-clinical PET/MR imaging to probe metabolic changes in cachexia. Her focus spans the use of molecular imaging to non-invasively probe whole-body metabolism and tumor evolution, and the biological validation of in vivo imaging signals. Emma gained her PhD in photoacoustic imaging from the University of Cambridge. 

Garrett is a PhD student in the Cravatt lab. He uses the application of Activity-based Protein Profiling (ABPP) to discover and functionally annotate proteins that contribute to human diseases, such as cancer. He is studying the mechanism of small molecules that modulate the RNA-binding protein, NONO. Studying these small molecules could provide a way forward for drugging the NONO protein for therapeutic applications. 

Natasha is a Clinical Pathologist at Stanford and postdoc in Howard Chang's lab. Her research is focused on the interplay between transcription and DNA damage in extrachromosomal DNA and developing new methods for ecDNA detection in clinical samples.

Debarati is a Research Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, following her PhD. She is leading the development and application of expansion sequencing (ExSeq). Her research work is focused on how nanoscale expansion sequencing can be implemented to reveal spatial relations between tumor and non-tumor cells for different stages of cancer from early development, and metastasis to disease resistance. 

Alex is a Posdoctoral Research Scientist in the laboratory of Professor Owen Sansom at the Beatson Institue for Cancer Research. His wok focuses on the role of oncogenic wnt signalling in cancer and why it is permissive in select organs such as the liver and intestine. 

Mariya is a postdoctoral fellow from Emma Lundberg’s group working on deciphering intratumor heterogeneity on a single-cell level.  Although trained as a clinician, she decided to pursue research and moved to Israel for Ph.D. studies. Her graduate work focused on breast cancer proteomics, aiming to understand the spatial inter- and intratumoral heterogeneity using a state-of-art mass spectrometry-based approach. 

Stephanie is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Catherine Bollard at the Children’s National Hospital. She earned her PhD at the George Washington University in fall 2023, with her research focused on tumor immunology. Her focus now has been two-fold: 1) tumor-associated antigen T cells, and 2) CAR T cells for the treatment of pediatric solid tumors.

Malcolm is a Postdoctoral Scholar in Dr. Majzners lab at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. As an MD in pediatric oncology he is fascinated by the clinical success of CAR T cell therapy in hematologic malignancies. His research in Team NexTGen now focusses on developing novel CAR T cell based therapies for solid pediatric tumors. This includes target identification and engineering of safe and specific CAR T cell constructs through utilizing the intracellular signaling machinery of the T-cell receptor.