ELA The Mark Foundation for Cancer Research Announces 2025 Emerging Leader Awards

NEW YORK, Jan. 15, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- The Mark Foundation for Cancer Research is proud to announce the recipients of the 2025 Emerging Leader Awards, recognizing five outstanding early-career scientists dedicated to revolutionizing cancer research through innovative projects. The Emerging Leader Award (ELA) program empowers these investigators, who will receive a total of $3.75 million to pursue innovative, high-risk/high-reward projects with the potential to transform cancer treatment.

"At The Mark Foundation, we believe that investing in the next generation of scientists is essential to unlocking fresh perspectives, innovative ideas, and new energy in the field of cancer research," said Ryan Schoenfeld, PhD, CEO of The Mark Foundation. "This year's award recipients are pursuing bold, transformative approaches to treating cancer across tumor types, and we are eager to see their groundbreaking projects come to life through the Emerging Leader Award program."

The 2025 ELA recipients are pursuing diverse research goals, including investigating the co-evolution of tumor and stromal cells, developing immunoprevention strategies for high-risk individuals, identifying metabolic vulnerabilities in brain cancer, creating new therapeutics targeting oncogenic fusions, and engineering synthetic T cell states for more effective immunotherapies.

The 2025 Mark Foundation Emerging Leader Award recipients are:

Liron Bar-Peled, PhD, Mass General Cancer Center
Molecular Staples: Protein Superglues Which Disrupt Oncogenic Fusions
Developing "molecular staples," a new class of drugs designed to disrupt oncogenic fusion proteins, which form when two genes abnormally join together and can drive many different types of cancers.

Kai Kessenbrock, PhD, University of California, Irvine
Targeting the Breast Microenvironment for Cancer Immunoprevention in BRCA1 Mutation Carriers 
Investigating the hypothesis that inherited BRCA1 mutations cause widespread alterations in breast tissue, including changes to the immune system, which may promote the initiation of breast cancer

Ansuman Satpathy, MD, PhD, Stanford University
Synthetic Transcription Factors and Cell States for Cancer Immunotherapy 
Engineering T cell states with enhanced anti-cancer activity using synthetic transcription factors to modulate gene expression and advanced machine learning tools

Mara Sherman, PhD, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
Identifying Spatially Conserved Programs During Tumor-Stroma Coevolution 
Seeking to uncover how different types of cancer-associated fibroblast cells drive tumor growth and resistance to therapy in pancreatic cancers and working to identify new strategies for treatment.

Daniel Wahl, MD, PhD, University of Michigan Rogel Cancer Center
Defining and Interrupting Microenvironment-Driven Metabolic Activity in Brain Cancer 
Determining how glioblastoma cells siphon nutrients from surrounding non-cancerous cells in the brain to fuel tumor growth and treatment resistance, information that will be used to develop improved therapies.

Each Emerging Leader Award provides $750,000 ($250,000 per year for three years) in funding. Since its inception in 2018, the ELA program has awarded over $37 million to early-career scientists.

To learn more about the Emerging Leader Award program and the 2025 recipients and for information about the 2026 application process, please visit themarkfoundation.org and follow @markfdn on X and The Mark Foundation for Cancer Research on LinkedIn.

About The Mark Foundation for Cancer Research

The Mark Foundation for Cancer Research, a charitable organization based in New York City, actively partners with scientists worldwide to accelerate research that will transform cancer prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. Since 2017, The Mark Foundation has awarded over $250 million in grants to investigators at more than 100 academic institutions across 16 countries, with research programs focusing on early career support, team science collaboration, new technology innovation, and therapeutics discovery. Additionally, The Mark Foundation maintains a growing portfolio of investments in early-stage cancer diagnostics and therapeutics companies, including several that have transitioned from grantee projects into commercial development. To learn more, please visit www.themarkfoundation.org

Media contact: Katherine Kremer [email protected]

SOURCE The Mark Foundation for Cancer Research