The Mark Foundation for Cancer Research

Chromosomal instability is present in 60–80% of cancers, but it isn’t directly targeted by any current treatments. In Nature Portfolio's Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology, Emerging Leader Award winner ⁩Samuel Bakhoum of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center highlights recent advances in our understanding of chromosomal instability that could lead to therapies for difficult-to-treat cancers. https://lnkd.in/eFEdxE6g

Mark Foundation-funded investigators are on a roll! In the second quarter of 2024, our grantees published 15 papers including Nature, Science, Nature Medicine, and more. Topics ranged from new therapeutic approaches to methods for high-dimensional tissue imaging, with papers by grantees including Andrew Lane, MD, PhD, Andy Minn, Dan-Avi Landau, Tobias Janowitz, Gregory Beatty, Hao Zhu, Jeffrey Rathmell, Alyssa Hasty, Kathryn Wellen, Jennifer Munkley, Kara Davis, Kivanç Birsoy, Margaret Shipp, Mihaela Angelova, and Robert Bradley. Read the papers: https://lnkd.in/gKZ2F79F

“Our main purpose is to fund the very best science that will have the biggest impact on the field.” Learn how The Mark Foundation is shaping the future of cancer care on the latest Believe in Progress podcast from the American Association for Cancer Research. In the episode, our CEO Ryan Schoenfeld and Chair Ray DuBois discuss global collaborations, interdisciplinary research, and the cancer research trends they're watching. Listen on your favorite podcast app, or watch a video of their interview at the link below! https://lnkd.in/eNZGSzqY

In 30 years, survival rates for kids with solid tumors have barely changed. That's why we're supporting the NexTGen Cancer Grand Challenges team with Cancer Research UK (CRUK) and the National Cancer Institute (NCI). The team, led by Catherine Bollard at Children's National Hospital and Martin Pule at University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, is working to develop and optimize novel CAR T-cell therapies for pediatric sarcomas and brain tumors. #SarcomaAwarenessMonth https://lnkd.in/efyKu-G4

🎉 We're proud to announce the recipients of this year's Momentum Fellowships! 🎉 ⭐Mihaela Angelova, PhD, The Francis Crick Institute ⭐Leire Bejarano Bosque, PhD, University of Lausanne - UNIL Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research ⭐Thang Do Cong, PhD, University of California, Berkeley ⭐Pablo Riera Freire, PhD, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Cancer Institute ⭐Elizabeth A R Garfinkle, PhD, Nationwide Children's Hospital ⭐Stephanie Gomez, PhD, Children's National Hospital ⭐Júlia Matas Gironella, PhD, Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, The University of Melbourne ⭐Vera Tiedje, MD, PhD, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center ⭐Ping Wang, PhD, University of Pennsylvania These promising investigators are pushing boundaries with work on tumor microenvironment evolution, tumor vasculature analysis, transcription factor degradation, and more.🔬🧬 Congratulations, all — we look forward to watching your work develop! https://lnkd.in/eFsnvTeb

June is #CancerImmunotherapyMonth — and if you’ve missed it, we’ve been highlighting some of our grantees’ exciting work in the field over on X. Here are a few projects to watch: Cancer patients’ immune systems often make antibodies that selectively recognize tumors — yet ultimately fail to kill tumor cells. 2024 Emerging Leader Award winner Aaron Meyer at UCLA is exploring whether variation in Fc domains could be to blame. Many cancers are more common and deadly in men—but therapies are often more toxic in women. Amy Moran at Oregon Health & Science University is using her Emerging Leader Award to study how sex hormones shape immune responses and work toward targeted therapies. And at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, ASPIRE Awardees Regina Barzilay and Tyler Jacks, PhD building novel machine learning methods to take on a notoriously difficult challenge — predicting the interactions between T cell receptors and peptide-MHC complexes. 

We’re thrilled to be at the 2024 Fondazione Pezcoller Symposium in Trento, Italy! Yesterday, Ryan Schoenfeld had the honor of presenting the first annual European Association for Cancer Research (EACR) - American Association for Cancer Research - Mark Foundation Travel Grants. This year, our exceptional recipients were: 🏆Olaf Klingbeil, PhD, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory 🏆Claudia Tonelli, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory 🏆Saber Imani, Shulan International Medical College, Zhejiang Shuren University 🏆Pier Vitale Nuzzo, Weill Cornell Medicine  🏆Monica Bequet, Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (CIGB) 🏆Sylvia Sue-Xian Liew Liew, Jeffrey Cheah School of Medicine and Health Sciences, Monash University Malaysia Congratulations to all!

There was a lot to celebrate — and learn — at this week’s #EACR2024 conference in Rotterdam!   We were thrilled to present the 2024 EACR-Mark Foundation-Fondazione Pezcoller Rising Star Award to Stamatis Papathanasiou, whose lab at the Institute of Molecular Biology (IMB) Mainz explores the impact of mitosis errors on chromatin organization and epigenome instability. 🏆⭐   Many of our grantees presented at the conference, including members of two Mark Foundation-funded Cancer Grand Challenges teams. Karen Cichowski of Brigham and Women's Hospital, who delivered a talk on RAS pathway-driven cancers, is part of the SPECIFICANCER group studying mechanisms that determine the tissue specificity of some cancer genes. Karin Straathof of UCL discussed her work on new-generation engineered T-cell therapies for children with solid cancers as a member of the NexTGen team.    We also heard from Sarah-Jane Dawson, a recent addition to The Mark Foundation Scientific Advisory Committee based at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, who shared her work using liquid biopsies to study mechanisms of therapy response.   Thanks for the great conference, European Association for Cancer Research (EACR) — we’re already looking forward to next year!

The Mark Foundation is dedicated to accelerating the most innovative cancer research. Check out the latest roundup of our grantees' high-profile publications from the past quarter here: 

For #BrainTumorAwarenessMonth, we're proud to partner with The Sontag Foundation to push forward new therapies for glioblastoma, including a fall workshop organized by William Kaelin, Sheila Singh, and Timothy Cloughesy. Together we can find a cure! #GrayMay #BTAM