The Mark Foundation for Cancer Research has announced the winners of its 2022 Emerging Leader Awards.

Seven early-career investigators were awarded grants of $750,000 over three years in support of high-risk, high-reward projects that have significant potential to improve outcomes for cancer patients. This year’s recipients include Karim-Jean Armache (NYU Grossman School of Medicine; “Molecular mechanisms of epigenetic crosstalk between histone modifications and DNA methylation in cancer: New avenues for drug development”); Jaehyuk Choi (Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, “Exploiting naturally occurring mutations to engineer next generation T cell therapies”); Nikhil Josh (Yale University School of Medicine, “Investigating how T-cell immunosurveillance restricts progression of developing tumors”); Dan Landau (Weill Cornell Medicine and New York Genome Center, “Deciphering the fitness determinants of clonal mosaicism”); Kamila Naxerova (Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, “Towards an ‘earliest detection’ assay for early-onset colorectal cancer”); Yuliya Pylayeva-Gupta (University of North Carolina Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, “Reprogramming B cell fate and function in cancer”); Sarah Slavoff (Department of Chemistry, Yale University, “Discovery of microproteins in melanoma”).

“This is the fourth year the Mark Foundation is encouraging the next generation of oncology superstars through our Emerging Leader Awards,” said Mark Foundation for Cancer Research interim CEO Ryan Schoenfeld, chief scientific officer, interim CEO. “These grants will enable researchers who are still in the early stage of their careers to pursue innovative projects that might never launch without our support. Our relationship with these scientists will continue for many years, and we look forward to the results of their research as well as their emergence as leaders in the field.”

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