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The PhRMA Foundation awarded a Predoctoral Fellowship in Drug Discovery to University of Illinois Cancer Center trainee Kate Alexander, an MD/PhD candidate in the Medical Scientist Training Program at the University of Illinois Chicago, whose mentor is Cancer Center Director Jan Kitajewski, PhD. 

The fellowship provides a $30,000 annual stipend for up to two years. Alexander is a member of the Kitajewski Lab in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics, where Kitajewski is Sweeney Professor and Head.

“This award is meaningful to me because I've seen groundbreaking cancer therapies save the lives of one set of grandparents, and I've also lived with the lasting effect of losing the other set of grandparents to aggressive cancers that still lack widely accessible and effective treatments,” she said.

The fellowship support will help her advance her research, which focuses on understanding the role of Notch4 in the breast tumor immune microenvironment.

Alexander explains that the Notch pathway is a crucial cellular program in development, playing a key role in angiogenesis, the process by which blood vessels form from existing vasculature. It can become dysfunctional in cancer, but the different members of the Notch family can impact cancer progression differently depending on the type of cancer.

“In breast cancer, we know that Notch4 plays a role in tumor development, and our lab has shown that targeting Notch4 with a novel anti-Notch4 antibody (produced by Eisai) can reduce breast tumor growth. By understanding how we can shape the immune system's response to cancer through Notch4 blockade, we can advance the development of novel anti-Notch4 treatments and offer new strategies to bring hope for cancer patients,” she said.