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, received a Lotus Award from the Pershing Square Foundation for his research on new immunotherapy targets in ovarian cancer, according to a June 15 announcement.
The Pershing Square Foundation funds ambitious cancer research projects and began supporting ovarian cancer research in 2025 with three-year grants of $750,000, now called Lotus Awards. This year, eight recipients were selected based on scientific rigor, originality, and potential to advance progress in ovarian cancer treatment.
"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 at the New York Genome Center.
Ovarian cancer often presents few or no symptoms in its early stages, leading most diagnoses to occur when the disease is advanced and more difficult to treat. Although targeted therapies and immunotherapies have improved standards of care recently, there remains significant need for further advances.
Dr. Landau's laboratory specializes in advanced methods such as single-cell profiling techniques to study cancers in detail and identify vulnerabilities that may be addressed by new therapies. For this project, his team will use these platforms to better understand changes occurring as ovarian cancer cells become malignant.
The team plans to investigate anomalies such as loss of normal gene-activity regulation during malignancy—including un-suppression of transposable elements ("jumping genes") within cellular DNA—and changes in RNA-splicing systems that influence protein production from genes. By studying these anomalies with their tools, Dr. Landau's group aims to identify unusual variants specific to ovarian cancer that could serve as targets for immunotherapies like T-cell based treatments.
