Luisa Escobar-Hoyos, MSc, PhD, an assistant professor in the Departments of Therapeutic Radiology, Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, and Medicine, has been awarded the 2025 Dr. Ralph and Marian Falk Medical Research Trust Transformational Award. This esteemed honor includes a $1 million grant to support groundbreaking scientific research with the potential to revolutionize medical treatment. Dr. Escobar-Hoyos' project, “Making Cancer Cells Look Like Bacteria: Developing Antigen-Mimicry Cancer Vaccines,” aims to create an innovative vaccine for pancreatic cancer. Her lab, along with the pancreatic cancer clinical team at Yale Cancer Center and Smilow Cancer Hospital, has developed a method to disguise pancreatic cancer cells as bacteria using the concept of "antigen mimicry." By coating cancer cells with sequences that resemble bacteria, specifically the M6 bacterial-wall factor of Streptococcus pyogenes, the immune system is tricked into attacking the cancer, similar to how it combats bacterial infections.
Preliminary results from mouse models and ex vivo patient trials have been promising. Their all-in-one vaccine not only trains immune cells to recognize cancer cells, but also actively marks them for destruction, akin to painting a bullseye on them. This breakthrough may lead to a new class of cancer vaccines and a universal strategy to make cancer cells more detectable to the immune system.
The Dr. Ralph and Marian Falk Medical Research Trust, established by Marian Falk in 1979, aims to fund biomedical research to improve treatments and eventually find cures for diseases without known cures.