The awardees are Marcos Simoes-Costa, assistant professor of molecular biology and genetics in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and Dr. Dan A. Landau, associate professor of medicine and a member of the Sandra and Edward Meyer Cancer Center at Weill Cornell Medicine.
Each year the foundation awards between two and five Distinguished Scientist grants to early-career researchers who have the potential to increase survival rates, improve recovery and discover better treatments for patients with brain cancer.
“We want to fuel significant advances in brain cancer research, which is why, through a competitive process, we award scientists who demonstrate promise for making scientific and medical breakthroughs in brain cancer research,” said Rick Sontag, president and co-founder of the Sontag Foundation.
Simoes-Costa studies the genetic circuits that control cellular identity and behavior during embryonic development, and the project supported by the foundation sits at the intersection of cancer genesis and developmental biology. He plans to investigate the specific genetic mechanisms that are abnormally activated during the formation of the central nervous system, which then lead to embryonal tumors.
“Support from the Sontag Foundation will allow us to define how developmental mechanisms are redeployed by cancer cells during tumorigenesis and metastasis,” he said.
“By examining the biology of cancer cells through a developmental prism, we hope to identify novel targets for therapeutic intervention,” Simoes-Costa said.
Using functional genomics and single-cell analysis, Simoes-Costa will determine what controls the transitions in cellular states that appear in pediatric brain cancers.
Simoes-Costa was named one of 50 Young Scientists under the age of 40 by the World Economic Forum in 2018, and received the New Innovator Award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2019.