Dr. Dan Landau, the Bibliowicz Family Professor of Medicine, and a member of the Sandra and Edward Meyer Cancer Center and the Englander Institute for Precision Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine, has received a Lotus Award from the Pershing Square Foundation for research aimed at uncovering new immunotherapy targets in ovarian cancer.
The Pershing Square Foundation supports ambitious cancer research projects, and since 2025 has been funding ovarian cancer research with three-year grants of $750,000, now called Lotus Awards. Awardees were selected for their scientific rigor, originality and potential to drive meaningful advances in a disease where progress is urgently needed. Dr. Landau is one of eight recipients this year.
“We’re grateful for this opportunity to develop new therapeutic perspectives to benefit patients with this deadly but relatively under-studied form of cancer,” said Dr. Landau, who is also a core faculty member of the New York Genome Center.
Ovarian cancer in its early stages has few or no symptoms; thus, most diagnoses are made when it is relatively advanced and harder to treat. More targeted therapies and immunotherapies have increased the standard of care in recent years, but there is still much room for improvement.
Dr. Landau’s laboratory develops and uses advanced laboratory methods, especially single-cell profiling techniques, to understand cancers in detail and uncover vulnerabilities that can be targeted with new therapies. For this project, he and his team will apply some of their advanced profiling platforms to better understand some of the changes that occur in ovarian cancer cells as they become malignant.
Malignancy generally involves a loss of normal gene-activity regulation, and while this may permit uncontrolled cell division, it can also give rise to many other anomalies. These include the un-suppression of transposable elements (“jumping genes”) in cellular DNA, as well as changes in the RNA-splicing system that helps determine how genes are translated into proteins.
Dr. Landau and his team will use their advanced tools to study these two types of anomalies in ovarian cancer, and to identify unusual, cancer-specific variants of proteins or other molecules to which these anomalies give rise. Such variants can then be used as cancer-specific targets for immunotherapies such as T-cell based therapies.
“Our work seeks to uncover how transposable elements dysregulation can serve as a way to specifically ID ovarian cancer cells for immunotherapy attack, with the hope of delivering much needed new therapeutic options for patients,” Dr. Landau said.