News

Samuel Allsup – Endowment Scholar
1st Year Scholar, PhD Candidate

Biochemistry and Molecular & Cellular Biology
Georgetown University

Research: 
My research is focused on using viral elements of the human genome to induce cell death in ovarian cancer cells, as well as attracting cells from the immune system to attack ovarian tumors.

How Will Your Research Benefit Society?
The 5-year survival rate for ovarian cancer – just 30% – has not significantly changed in decades, illustrating the serious need for new and inventive treatments for patients with this disease. Ovarian cancer is characterized by poor recognition by the patient immune system, which means that while other forms of cancer have benefitted drastically from the advent of immunotherapies, ovarian cancer has yet to see significant benefit from these therapies. Our research focuses on activating the innate immune system to produce signaling molecules to notify the immune system of apparent “infection”, attract immune cells, and lead to cell growth inhibition and cell death. This novel method of leveraging the innate immune system within the cancer cells themselves in order to kill cancer cells relies on a field of immunology that is well studied for the treatment of infectious disease, but is not utilized to its full potential in cancer research. We propose to harness this particular field of immunology to activate patient immune response to ovarian cancer, and potentially to other cancers as well, increasing survival and improving prognosis.

How will an ARCS Award Benefit Your Research?
This award would allow me to utilize cutting edge methods of immune profiling to characterize the immune response of ovarian cancer to a novel method of therapy, synthetic innate immune activation, as well as the potential to combine this new therapy with existing cancer treatments to augment their response. Immune cells and immune responses are driven by signaling molecules called cytokines and chemokines, which activate, attract and drive anti-tumor immune cells. Multiplex high-throughput cytokine/chemokine profiling would allow me to understand the complex, often minute changes in immune signaling which drastically influence immune responses in-vivo. Immune responses are also driven by spatial location of immune and cancer cells. Multiplex spatial immunostaining allows for extremely precise, microscopic analysis of the spatial aspect of anti-tumor immune responses in response to a novel innate immune therapy.

Without this generous award from ARCS award, I would not be able to fund this mix of extensive immune cell profiling, cytokine and chemokine analysis and spatial immune mapping, in combination with a novel and innovative method of ovarian cancer therapy. This funding would allow for an extremely deep and nuanced understanding of changes in the immune environment of ovarian cancer induced by this treatment. With our proposed method of activating the innate immune system within the cancer cells themselves, we may be able to augment the response of ovarian cancer to established immunotherapies which have yet to show benefit.

Career Objectives: I plan to pursue a career in medical cancer research, focusing specifically on underserved research areas like female reproductive cancers. My path includes targeted postdoctoral training, focusing on female reproductive cancers, followed by a transition to the pharmaceutical industry, where I will focus on maximizing the clinical impact of my work. As my career progresses, I hope to lead research teams developing cutting-edge, novel methods of cancer screenings and therapies specifically focused on addressing healthcare disparities. My goal in combining my academic research with experience in the pharmaceutical industry is to bridge the critical gap between laboratory discoveries and marketable treatments in the United States.