The Future’s So Bright

Scientific progress is often incremental, with new findings and new ideas formed by learning from prior investigations.

Early-career researchers are tasked with moving progress forward; they are the best hope for the future. That’s why each year, Let’s Win, along with the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), supports the attendance of several scholars-in-training at the annual disease-specific pancreatic cancer meeting.

The 2025 AACR Special Conference on Cancer Research: Advances in Pancreatic Cancer Research—Emerging Science Driving Transformative Solutions was no exception. 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 meet with established researchers and present their work.

The seven young scientists chosen for this year’s event are studying pancreatic cancer from many different angles. But their unified hope is to find ways to provide pancreatic cancer patients with early detection and treatment options that will extend life. Take a minute to learn a little bit about this year’s scholars, and you too will see the future is indeed looking bright.

Targeting the Extracellular Matrix

Mohamad Assi, Ph.D., says his parents certainly influenced his interest in the biomedical field. But it was during a summer rotation in a pharmacy when he became fascinated by reading the notes included within drug packages explaining their mechanisms of action. That was the moment, he says, when he knew he wanted to become a scientist.

Assi is currently a postdoctoral fellow at NYU Langone Health in New York City. He also received postdoctoral training at the de Duve Institute, Brussels, Belgium. He did undergraduate work in biochemistry at the Lebanese University, Beirut, and he completed his master’s degree in cellular and molecular biology at Université de la Réunion, on Reunion Island. He received his Ph.D. in cancer biology from Université Rennes, in Rennes, France.  

His work focuses on the extracellular matrix, or ECM. The abundance of the ECM is a key feature predicting poorer prognosis in pancreatic cancer. The ECM is composed of scar tissue or fibers surrounding tumor cells. His work shows that pancreatic cancer cells can sense the ECM to optimally support their survival under stress through a process called autophagy. Using biochemical assays, mouse models, and clinical samples, he and colleagues show that ECM-mediated regulation of autophagy levels defines the ability of tumor cells to grow and respond to anticancer therapies. Finally, they demonstrate that mechanistic findings could be leveraged to target ECM sensing, thusd sensitizing pancreatic tumors to various FDA-approved therapies, which have limited efficacy when only used as single agents. 

Assi began working on pancreatic cancer in 2017. Overcoming the challenges associated with pancreatic cancer through understanding its molecular mechanisms to design effective therapeutic strategies was his main motivation. He believes the field has experienced great progress in the last several years. And although that’s very encouraging, additional effort is still required to achieve the goal of providing durable treatments for pancreatic cancer, he says.

In five years, he hopes to lead a research group in academia while closely collaborating with industry. His aim is to dissect the roadmap of ECM sensing in fibrotic diseases such as pancreatic cancer.

Outside of work, you can find Assi running by the East River, cooking, reading, or simply watching a good TV show.

Gaining a Better Understanding of Tumor Progression, Immunosuppression, and Metastasis

Angisha Basnet is a fifth-year Ph.D. student in Dr. Tracy Liu‘s lab at the West Virginia University School of Medicine in Morgantown. Her interest in science traces back to childhood curiosity marked by a persistent interest in the factors contributing to the high mortality rate associated with infectious diseases, despite the commendable efforts of healthcare professionals and researchers worldwide.

This quest was significantly intensified by a personal experience: the loss of her mother due to what seemed like a common ailment, a mere sore throat and rheumatic fever. This event deeply affected her intellectual curiosity, fostering a commitment to delve into the intricate mechanisms underlying diseases. This is why her academic path leaned toward biology during high school and, subsequently, a focus on biotechnology in undergraduate studies and current Ph.D. work in immunology and microbial pathogenesis.

Basnet’s presentation investigated the link between reactive oxygen species (ROS) and neutrophil extracellular traps formation in pancreatic cancer. While these processes are important for host defense, their prolonged elevation can promote tumor progression, immunosuppression, and metastasis. Her work highlights the use of an ROS-sensitive L-012 bioluminescence reporter to monitor these processes in real time in pancreatic cancer.

While she was doing her lab rotation during the first year of her Ph.D., Basnet discovered Liu’s lab and the work being done in pancreatic cancer. As she got to learn more about pancreatic cancer during her rotation, she became fascinated and challenged by how difficult it is to treat and how innate immune cells, which are supposed to protect against disease, can instead contribute to immunosuppression within the tumor microenvironment. This complexity motivated her to study pancreatic cancer and explore ways to modulate the immune system to improve therapeutic outcomes.

In the future, Basnet would like to work in the biotech industry’s research and development sector, focusing on translating laboratory discoveries into clinical applications. She is particularly interested in contributing to clinical trial research, where she can help translate laboratory discoveries into patient-centered applications and directly impact the lives of cancer patients.

In her downtime, Basnet enjoys traveling and hiking.

Focusing on Fibroblasts

Allison Bischoff is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate at the University of Michigan. She is working toward a Ph.D. in cancer biology in the lab of Marina Pasca di Magliano, Ph.D., and Filip Bednar, M.D., Ph.D. Her undergraduate degree in molecular genetics was completed at The Ohio State University (Columbus). 

Bischoff’s work has focused on further dissecting the heterogenous role of cancer-associated fibroblasts in pancreatic cancer. Multiple groups have shown the pancreatic cancer-associated fibroblasts can derive from different mesenchymal cell types in the healthy pancreas and these origins can dictate their functional role in the disease. Her work focuses on Wilms Tumor 1 (WT1) expressing mesenchymal cells in the normal pancreas which include mesothelial cells and a small subset of pancreas-resident fibroblasts.

These cells can give rise to inflammatory cancer-associated fibroblasts, which maintain expression of WT1 and promote cancer growth independent of anti-tumoral immune responses. Instead, WT1+ cancer-associated fibroblasts express high levels of tumor-promoting ligands that likely interact directly with the tumor epithelium to promote tumor progression. 

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.

During the next five years, she hopes to finish her postdoctoral studies in pancreatic cancer research and establish a research group at an academic institution.

When she’s not working, Bischoff enjoys playing video games, ordering takeout, and spending time with her friends.

The Ketogenic Diet

When she was a little girl, Ericka Velez-Bonet, Ph.D., remembers being greatly concerned about her mother’s health. Her mom needed 16 different medications—Velez-Bonet dreamed of developing a single drug that could replace them all. This dream has resulted in her earning her Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Nutrition from The Ohio State University in December 2024. She is currently serving as a Postdoctoral Scholar in the lab of Zobeida Cruz-Monserrate, Ph.D.

The focus of her work is the ketogenic diet and its effects on pancreatic cancer. The goal of her presentation was to determine whether the diet could prevent tumor development and how it changes pancreatic cancer metabolism. The findings show that the ketogenic diet prevented obesity-associated pancreatic cancer independent of weight loss but promoted cancer in lean mice, linked to changes in specific metabolic pathways.

Velez-Bonet was awarded the opportunity to complete a summer internship at MD Anderson Cancer Center (Houston, Texas) in 2013, through their U54 Partnership for Excellence in Cancer Research Program for students at the University of Puerto Rico School of Medicine in San Juan. It was during this time she learned more about pancreatic cancer and the work that needed to be done to improve lives. In five years, she hopes to be serving as a lead scientist coordinating cross-disciplinary research in cancer metabolism and nutrition, guiding teams that translate metabolic discoveries into preclinical or clinical applications. She also hopes to continue contributing to cancer research outreach through her volunteer work with Pelotonia, an organization that raises funds for cancer research, and other nonprofits.

In her spare time, she likes to catch up on some much-needed sleep, play board games and pickleball, walk, and watch TV series like The Mentalist, Ted Lasso, and The Big Bang Theory.

Monitoring HuR Activity

Miffy Guo is a Ph.D. student co-mentored by Jonathon Brody, Ph.D., and Robert Eil, M.D., in the Program in Biomedical Sciences at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) in Portland. She completed her undergraduate degree in biology at Reed College (Portland). After her undergraduate studies, she worked as a research assistant in the lab of Naoki Oshimori, Ph.D. at OHSU. This is where she developed an interest in cancer biology. 

Guo’s work has focused on HuR, a network of signaling pathways. She and colleagues found that HuR, a post-transcriptional regulator, is involved in multiple pro-oncogenic pathways of pancreatic cancer and could be a useful therapeutic marker and biomarker of response. They also found that HuR suppresses anti-tumor immunity and makes T cells unable to kill cancer cells effectively. HuR accomplishes this by competing for the same nutrient that T cells need to function in the microenvironment. HuR thus contributes to pancreatic cancer’s potential to progress to metastasis directly.

Translationally, HuR is a mediator of KRAS activity, which is the first oncogenic pathway that is turned on in pancreatic cancer. Monitoring HuR activity could be used as a biomarker to reflect if patients are responding to KRAS inhibitors or becoming resistant.

Guo wants to study pancreatic cancer because of its deadly nature and lack of optimal therapies. And she believes the transformative power of basic research will indeed improve the lives of pancreatic cancer patients. She credits a very passionate high school biology teacher for inspiring her scientific curiosity in biology as well as an undergraduate mentor who gave her the opportunity to conduct her first independent research project. Now, she says her graduate mentors are instrumental in helping her build her project and also grow as an independent scientist.

When she finds the time, Guo enjoys playing tennis, skiing, and crafting. 

Unraveling Cancer Progression

Jungseung Nam, Ph.D., was just in high school when he recognized that he was thoroughly enjoying chemistry and biology. That’s when he first became interested in how basic chemical building blocks translate into biological outcomes.

Nam received his undergraduate, graduate, and Ph.D. in chemistry at Ulsan National Institute of Science & Technology (Ulsan, South Korea). He is currently serving as a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, in New York City. He focuses on molecular design strategies to develop chemical tools. He explains that since he’s been interested in addressing unanswered biological questions using chemistry, he first focused on developing his expertise in organic/organometallic chemical synthesis to create chemical tools that precisely fit the purpose of exploring specific unknown biological phenomena. He presented his work on cachexia at the conference.

As you know, cancer cachexia is a severe metabolic syndrome where patients lose fat and muscle, leading to involuntary weight loss, poor responses to therapy, and higher mortality. It affects roughly half of all cancer patients and is especially common in pancreatic cancer. Although the exact drivers remain unclear, recent studies show that fat wasting happens before muscle loss and that preserving fat can help protect muscle.

In this work, Nam and colleagues show that a specific redox modification on a methionine residue within the catalytic subunit of protein kinase A is a key trigger of adipose browning and cachexia. This methionine redox status, controlled by the balance between reactive oxygen species and the repair enzyme methionine sulfoxide reductase A, highlights how oxidative post-translational modification of methionine residues can reprogram adipose tissue and drive the development of cancer cachexia.

Nam says that early in his training, he worked with redox-active organometallic complexes and saw how small changes at the molecular level could dramatically alter protein behavior. That experience pushed him to ask a broader question: How do chemical modifications inside cells rewire metabolism and influence disease progression?

Pancreatic cancer became a natural focus for him because it is one of the most metabolically rewired and clinically devastating tumors. His goal is to understand how redox regulation and post-translational modifications reshape the metabolism to be beneficial for tumor progression, so we can eventually identify vulnerabilities that improve patient outcomes. As his career progresses, he plans on pursuing his interest in how protein function can be regulated by oxidative post-translational modification to reinforce the cancer progression and hopes to get an independent position to lead his research.

When he is out of the lab, Nam enjoys running and cooking. In fact, he does weekly Saturday runs and recently ran his second New York City Marathon along with his wife, a shared experience he says was incredible.

Understanding PanINs

Jude Okoye, Ph.D., is a research fellow at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He received his bachelor’s degree in medical laboratory science from Ebonyi State University, Abakaliki, Nigeria, and his master’s and Ph.D. in clinical and experimental histopathology from Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Nigeria.

Okoye is particularly interested in pancreatic intraepithelial neoplasia, or PanINs, and how some may transform into cancer. Most pancreatic cancers are diagnosed at late stages. The major precursor lesions, known as a PanIN, are common in all ages, regardless of health status. However, only a few PanINs transform into malignant tumors. His research focuses on using spatial transcriptomics, single-cell RNA sequencing, proteomics, and organoid culture to identify the phenotypes of potentially malignant PanINs and the unique pathways that drive their progression to cancer. He hopes to help develop a panel that will increase early detection and a drug that will inhibit the progression of the disease among high-risk individuals.

Okoye became interested in science after a family tragedy. His father died from an undiagnosed disease and Okoye hopes to help reduce the rate of death associated with undiagnosed diseases through research. He says he studies pancreatic cancer because it is the most lethal cancer in Nigeria and patients there with the disease present at late stages and are only given palliative care.

In a few years, he hopes to establish his own lab and would like to mentor many high school, undergraduate, and graduate students. His major goal is to influence cancer-related policies in Africa through leadership and his community engagements.

When he is out of the lab, Okoye enjoys spending time with his wife and kids as well as reading business books and autobiographies of great leaders.