Six Researchers Shaping What Comes Next

A key part of making progress in science is to share findings so new investigators can take up the mantle of research.

That’s why each year, Let’s Win and the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), support the attendance of several scholars-in-training at the annual pancreatic cancer special meeting. Conference attendance ensures these early investigators will not only be privy to some of the latest breakthroughs in pancreatic cancer, but they will also have the opportunity to present their work to established researchers.

The six young scientists chosen for the 2026 AACR Conference on Pancreatic Cancer: New Frontiers in Biology and Therapeutic Development are studying pancreatic cancer from many different angles. But they have one thing in common—the hope to find ways to provide means for early detection and treatment options that will extend life for patients. Take a minute to learn a little bit about this year’s scholars, and you too will see the future is indeed promising.

Toward a Better Understanding of Cell Signaling

Allison Bischoff is a two-time awardee, having been sponsored in 2025 as well. She investigated the role of Notch signaling in pancreatic cancer development. While Notch signaling in pancreatic cancer cells has been extensively studied, little is known about the role of Notch in cells of the pancreatic tumor microenvironment, including fibroblasts and myeloid cells. She and her colleagues used genetically engineered mouse models to inhibit Notch signaling in fibroblasts and myeloid cells independently.

They found that inhibition of Notch in fibroblasts had little impact on development of early lesions of pancreatic cancer. However, inhibition in myeloid cells slowed development of early lesions and eventual progression to pancreatic cancer. According to Bischoff, this finding supports a pathogenic role of myeloid-specific Notch signaling and could inform intelligent design of Notch-targeting therapies in pancreatic cancer.

Bischoff conducted this research at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, as part of her Ph.D. work. Currently, she is a research scholar at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (New York, New York) in the labs of Dr. Thomas Norman and Dr. Mara Sherman.

Bischoff’s introduction to research came during her undergraduate years, when she worked in a neuroimmunology lab led by Dr. Tamar Gur. She became very interested in studying how different cell types talk to each other through cell signaling. When looking for areas of research for her Ph.D., Bischoff kept coming back to pancreatic cancer as an interesting model system to study cell signaling. That’s because pancreatic cancer is uniquely characterized by infiltration and expansion of both cancer and noncancerous cell types that can be co-opted by the cancer to promote disease progression. She also wanted her research to be clinically impactful and there remains a large unmet clinical need for new methods to treat pancreatic cancer patients.

Bischoff hopes to finish her postdoctoral studies in pancreatic cancer research and establish a research group at an academic institution.

Overcoming Drug Resistance

Qingxiang Lin, Ph.D., is currently an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellow at the Krantz Family Center for Cancer Research at Massachusetts General Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School (Boston, Massachusetts). His translational research focuses on understanding why pancreatic cancer treatments fail and developing therapeutic strategies to overcome drug resistance.

Lin earned his undergraduate and master’s degrees in China, where he discovered novel small molecules for cancer therapeutics and investigated their pharmacological mechanisms in cancer metabolism and chemoresistance. He completed his doctoral training in biophysics at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, along with pharmaceutical sciences training at the University at Buffalo, both in Buffalo, New York. He investigated pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic mechanisms of chemoresistance in pancreatic cancer and employed experimental and computational systems approaches to improve pancreatic cancer treatment for clinical translation.

Lin’s postdoctoral work focuses on mechanisms of adaptive resistance to emerging KRAS-targeted therapies in pancreatic cancer and therapeutic strategies to reverse the resistance mechanisms. His research aims to understand how pancreatic cancer escapes KRAS-targeted therapies and to identify the cancer’s “Achille’s heel,” the therapeutic vulnerabilities that can be exploited to overcome resistance and improve treatment outcomes. His ultimate goal is to stay one step ahead of pancreatic cancer, anticipating how tumors might escape treatment and developing rational combinations to prevent or overcome resistance, with the hope of achieving deeper and longer-lasting responses for patients.

Lin hopes to lead his own independent research laboratory as a faculty member, working at the intersection of cancer biology, chemical biology, systems pharmacology, computational science, and translational oncology. As a former science teacher, he is passionate about education and mentorship.

Engineering T Cells

Priyanila Magesh is a fifth-year Ph.D. student at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Minneapolis. She received her Bachelor of Technology in biotechnology from the National Institute of Technology Calicut, India and was then awarded direct admission into the Ph.D. program at the University of Minnesota.

Magesh’s research focuses on engineering T cells to better navigate, locate, and attack tumors, and she also studies how the tumor barriers shape immune cell migration and function. She notes that CAR T cell therapy, which engineers a patient’s T cells to attack cancer, has struggled in pancreatic cancer because T cells cannot penetrate the dense, fibrotic tumor environment. Her research combines biophysics and genome engineering to build CAR T cells that move through these barriers more effectively. Her interest in oncology research began as an undergraduate, when she did internships building nanoscaffolds to study degradation and drug release kinetics.

Magesh was inspired by mentors and teachers who were focused on building impactful therapies for poor-prognosis cancers. Growing up, she watched women in her family survive cancer and came to understand their recovery was made possible by research. She then wanted to add to that body of knowledge. She has focused on poor-prognosis cancers, where patients and families still have too few options. Magesh would love to provide these patients with one more treatment, one more year, or one more chance.

In the future, Magesh hopes to become a principal scientist leading interdisciplinary teams in cancer immunotherapy, helping carry promising new treatments from the lab into preclinical and clinical development. She also wants to launch a women’s health company, driven by the same purpose behind her research: translating scientific discoveries into practical solutions, but specifically bridging gaps in women’s health care.

Understanding Precursor Lesions

Jude Okoye, M.S., Ph.D., is another two-time awardee, currently researching at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor). He is currently studying precursor lesions, including intraductal papillary mucinous neoplasm (IPMN) and pancreatic intraepithelial neoplasia (PanIN). He and colleagues have recently reported that PanINs are common and heterogeneous in healthy individuals, but they harbor some basal-like and classical-like histologic patterns previously reported in pancreatic cancer. However, there are limited studies on the molecular profile and transformative risk of PanIN phenotypes.

In partnership with Gift of Life Michigan, Okoye and colleagues collected 127 pancreases from donors, aged 21 to 76 years. Additionally, they collected pancreatic cancer surgical samples. Their work revealed high activity of a gene called DKK1 in most classical-like PanINs but low DKK1 activity in basal-like PanINs. This suggests that DKK1 may have a role in epithelial cellular identity in both PanINs and tumors.

Back in 2018, a close friend of his was diagnosed with breast cancer. At the time, Okoye was pursuing a Ph.D. at the Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Nigeria. Despite undergoing surgery and receiving chemotherapy abroad, his friend passed away. Okoye decided to switch his Ph.D. research from chemo-toxicology to cancer biology. In 2021, his thesis earned the Merck Foundation’s “Best Young African Researcher on Cancer Research and Vaccine Development.”

After completing a fellowship, Okoye was offered a postdoctoral research fellow position by the University of Michigan.  He was also recently selected for the Inaugural Rogel and Blondy Fellowship, by the Rogel and Blondy Center for Pancreatic Cancer for his research on premalignant lesions.

Unraveling the Immune Response

Anna Thickens is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the Cancer Biology (Cell and Molecular Biology) Program at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. She knew she wanted to become a research scientist when she joined a research lab as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Thickens’s research focuses on how macrophages coordinate nonclassical mechanisms of T cell cytotoxicity against pancreatic cancer. She is also studying how RAS inhibitors improve the efficacy and durability of this immunotherapy, while identifying optimal treatment sequencing. Her long-term career goal is to become an independent investigator at a research institution and she hopes to lead a laboratory focused on developing effective immunotherapies for pancreatic cancer.

Thickens enjoys this area of research because she finds it fascinating the way the immune system recognizes, or fails to recognize, cancerous compared to healthy cells. She became particularly interested in pancreatic cancer because of the limited understanding of what drives an effective immune response in this disease and wants to contribute to research that advances our understanding of the disease. To that end, she hopes to become a postdoctoral fellow on the path to being a research professor. 

The Macrophage Connection

Tamara Lopez-Vidal is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in the Biochemistry, Cellular and Molecular Biology program at Johns Hopkins (Baltimore, Maryland). She earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Westminster (London, United Kingdom), followed by a master’s degree in infection and immunity from University College London. She then worked as a research technician in GI oncology at Johns Hopkins before beginning her Ph.D. in the Zimmerman Lab at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

Lopez-Vidal’s research focuses on how pancreatic cancer cells communicate with nearby macrophages and affect their behavior. Specifically, her presented abstract showed how the VEGFA–NRP1 signaling axis keeps macrophages in a state that suppresses the immune response. While working as a research technician in the gastrointestinal oncology department at Johns Hopkins, she became interested in pancreatic cancer’s limited response to treatment and its immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment. The abundance of macrophages that can hinder antitumor immunity led her to wonder which signaling pathways drive this suppression and whether targeting them could improve treatment. In the future, Lopez-Vidal hopes to continue pursuing research either through an academic or industry postdoctoral position with the goal of establishing a research group to explore ways to modulate the immune system to improve therapeutic outcomes. 

Lopez-Vidal first became interested in science back in elementary school, since science was the class that overlapped with her English as a second language class. She wanted to do the thing all her friends were doing, so she and her mother started doing science experiments at home after school. In addition to it becoming a great bonding experience with her mother, science became her guide to finding out answers to all the unknowns in the world. When Lopez-Vidal came to realize that not every disease has a cure, translational research became a source of hope and that hope that a cure is imminent for someone you love, is the motivation that keeps her going.