John Hickey, Assistant Professor in Biomedical Engineering Duke University, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“Thrilled to share that I’ve been named a V Foundation Scholar Award recipient!
This multi-year award from the V Foundation for Cancer Research will support our lab’s efforts at Duke BME to tackle a major challenge in cancer immunotherapy:
How can we better engineer T cells to overcome the barriers that solid tumors create?
While T cell therapies have transformed outcomes for some blood cancers, solid tumors like pancreatic, colorectal, and lung cancers remain incredibly difficult to treat.
Our lab is working to change that — using advanced multiplex imaging and quantitative tools to understand how T cells move, interact, and function within real tumor environments, and how we can guide them to be more effective cancer killers.
I’m deeply grateful to my fantastic team, collaborators, mentors, and the Duke community for making this work possible — and to the V Foundation for investing in early-career researchers working to push the boundaries of cancer science.
Excited to dive into this next chapter and to share what we learn as we work toward more effective immunotherapies for patients.
Duke Engineering recently wrote a wonderful feature on the project and why this work could matter for T cell cancer therapies — check it out.”