Ribeiro Pereira Wins Young Investigator Award

Patrícia M. Ribeiro Pereira, PhD, assistant professor of radiology, has received the 2022 Young Investigator Award from the Cancer Research Foundation. The award is a two-year, $100,000 grant intended to help promising early-career cancer scientists build a primary dataset and lay the groundwork for larger projects. The grant aims to solve the all-too-common dilemma young investigators often face: they don’t have enough data to solicit funding, but they need more funding to collect data. 

Ribeiro Pereira’s project, “Temporal control over endocytosis to convert cancer immunotherapy non-responders to responders,” uses whole-body molecular imaging to show how cancer cells draw proteins inside their cells (endocytosis), making them inaccessible to the antibody therapies that target the proteins.  

Ribeiro Pereira, a principal investigator in the Precision Radiotheranostics Translation Center, hopes to temporally control the way cancer cells internalize these targets and make therapies more effective. She will particularly focus on immune checkpoint PD-L1, a popular therapeutic target because of its role in the ability of cancer cells to escape immune surveillance. 

Read more from the Cancer Research Foundation.