Researcher Stories
Get to know the PhRMA Foundation’s award recipients.
Combining Immunotherapy and Chemotherapy for Better Cancer Treatment
Kaitlyn Pierpont, a PhD student at Weill Cornell Medicine, is researching how to improve cancer treatment by combining two therapies: chemotherapy and chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy.
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Looking Beyond GLP-1 Therapies to Treat Obesity
Kate Bowman, a PhD student at the University of Michigan, is investigating alternative therapeutic targets for treating obesity.
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How Checking the Wrong Box Led to the Right Career Path in Cancer Research
Ahmad Salman Sirajee, a PhD student at Rutgers University, is developing a noninvasive diagnostic tool that identifies patterns of DNA fragments in the bloodstream to help doctors better classify and monitor bladder cancer patients.
Watch NowProblem-Solving to Fix Lab Equipment and Advance Cancer Therapy
Abe Wu, a PhD student at the University of Washington, is developing biomaterials to improve cancer cell therapies, which use engineered immune cells to target and kill tumors.
Awardee Spotlight
Ruida Hou, MD, PhD
- St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital
“This fellowship is a tremendous milestone in my scientific journey. It will allow me to deepen our mechanistic understanding of pyrimidine metabolism vulnerabilities in ALL and accelerate efforts to translate these insights into precision therapies for children with cancer.”
Designing Tiny ‘Grenades’ to Penetrate Solid Cancer Tumors
Indrani Das, an MD‑PhD student at Case Western Reserve University, is developing a peptide that can penetrate solid cancer tumors to improve chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy.