This MIT Chemistry announcement reports that Alex Shalek was selected as one of five early-career investigators in the 2018 class of Pew-Stewart Scholars for Cancer Research, a program supporting innovative approaches to understanding and treating cancer. The award provides flexible funding to pursue ambitious research, which Shalek’s lab applies to studying leptomeningeal disease, a severe and poorly understood form of cancer metastasis affecting the brain and spinal cord. Using their Seq-Well single-cell RNA sequencing platform, the team aims to profile rare cancerous and immune cells in patient cerebrospinal fluid and track how they respond to immunotherapy. Their work seeks to uncover mechanisms of treatment response and identify biomarkers that could guide more effective therapies for aggressive metastatic cancers.
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