Dr. Dan Landau, Bibliovich Family Professor of Medicine and member of the Sandra Edward Meyer Cancer Center and the Englander Institute for Precision Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College, has been awarded the Pershing Square Foundation’s Lotus Prize for his research aimed at discovering new immunotherapeutic targets in ovarian cancer.
The Pershing Square Foundation supports ambitious cancer research projects and, starting in 2025, will fund ovarian cancer research with a three-year, $750,000 grant, now known as the Lotus Prize. The award winners were selected for their scientific rigor, originality, and potential to drive meaningful advances in diseases where progress is urgently needed. Dr. Landau is one of eight recipients of this year’s award.
“We are grateful for this opportunity to develop new therapeutic perspectives that will benefit patients with this deadly but relatively understudied cancer,” said Dr. Landau, who is also a core faculty member at the New York Genome Center.
Early stage ovarian cancer has few or no symptoms. Therefore, most diagnoses are made when the disease is relatively advanced and difficult to treat. Although standard treatments have improved in recent years with more targeted treatments and immunotherapies, there is still much room for improvement.
Dr. Landau’s lab develops and uses advanced testing methods, particularly single-cell profiling techniques, to better understand cancer and uncover vulnerabilities that can be targeted with new treatments. In this project, he and his team will apply some of their advanced profiling platforms to better understand some of the changes that occur as ovarian cancer cells become malignant.
Malignant tumors usually involve loss of normal control of gene activity, which can allow uncontrolled cell division, but can also lead to many other abnormalities. These include the derepression of transposable elements (‘jumping genes’) in cellular DNA and changes in the RNA splicing system that help determine how genes are translated into proteins.
Dr. Landau and his team plan to use advanced tools to study these two types of abnormalities in ovarian cancer and identify abnormal, cancer-specific mutations in proteins and other molecules that these abnormalities cause. Such variants can be used as cancer-specific targets for immunotherapies, such as T cell-based therapies.
Our research aims to reveal how dysregulation of metastatic elements can serve as a way to specifically identify ovarian cancer cells targeted for immunotherapeutic attack, providing patients with much-needed new treatment options. ”
Dr. Dan Landau, Bibliowicz Family Professor of Medicine
