Distinguished Scholars
The renowned Distinguished Scholars program supports scientists who are at the very top in their field and at the forefront of today’s most exciting breakthroughs in pancreatic cancer research. Each grantee receives $5 million in funding over five years, enabling them to dedicate more of their time and focus to pancreatic cancer and pursue high-risk, high-reward research.
Lustgarten’s funding and support of this research has led to a revolution in understanding the disease, enabling new approaches to diagnosis and treatment.
Meet the Researchers
Dr. Evans is a professor and biologist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. Dr. Evans is an authority on hormones and his research focuses on the function of nuclear hormone signaling and metabolism. His lab has discovered that a chemically modified form of vitamin D might offer a new approach to treating pancreatic cancer. With clinicians at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Evans’ team launched a clinical trial to test this drug in pancreatic cancer patients, which is ongoing.
Dr. Fearon’s research career began at Harvard in the laboratory of Dr. Frank Austen. The subject of his research was innate immunity, and he made significant contributions to understanding the immune system. In 1984, he was appointed full Professor at Harvard Medical School and deputy chair of the Department of Rheumatology and Immunology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Dr. Fearon became increasingly interested in the connections between innate and acquired immunity and decided to study cancer immunology in collaboration with his former Ph.D. student and Lustgarten Chief Scientist, Dr. David Tuveson.
Dr. Vogelstein is Director of the Ludwig Center, Clayton Professor of Oncology and Pathology and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at The Johns Hopkins Medical School and Kimmel Cancer Center. He has published more than 500 scientific papers, which have been cited nearly 300,000 times, more often than those of any other scientist, in any discipline, in recorded history. If books in addition to research papers are included, Dr. Vogelstein is ranked as the 8th most cited scholar of all time, with Sigmund Freud ranking first.