Rebekah Dresek, PHD, Rice University, Era of Hope Scholar:

I received one of the DOD Era of Hope Scholar awards, which funds five years of research on our efforts to develop new optical molecular imaging tools for screening detection and monitoring the breast cancer as well as a variety of nano-engineered imaging agents which we use to provide molecular contrast along with the optical tools. The research in our group consists of three parts. We do basic science, applied technology development, and translationary research or clinical trials that is focused on developing inexpensive point-of-care tools that use light in new ways to look for cancer. So this, where you see a penny right here, this little probe that you see that is only less than a millimeter is an example of what the actual imaging tool looks like. And what you can do is without taking any tissue outside of the body, in the body you can look and see literally with very high resolution individual cells. Then we go back and develop imaging agents which allow us to instead of looking at the morphological image, which you would usually look at, look at molecular features that are indicative of the progression of the cancer. And so that's what this is showing over here. So instead of just seeing the cells we're seeing HER2 expression on the surface of the cells. But unlike most technologies that do this now, we are able to do this in the body without having to remove the cells or the tissue from the body. That's really the importance of these kinds of tools.

So one of the main emphasis in our lab, we are right across the street from MD Anderson Cancer Center and so our project is joint with MD Anderson, is getting some of these technologies into clinical trials. In each of these techniques we already have. We are in the first year of our project and we have clinical trials approved by MD Anderson's IRB and Rice's IRB so we try within the first few years to be in the clinic because that's the best way to see what the problems we're going to have with our techniques. Without doubt this has been the most important grant that I've received in my career so far. Both because it is a larger grant than is typically given to young investigators and it provides you a lot of dedicated time to push forward a particular project and it's also very flexible funding relative to most of the NSF and NIH mechanisms that you could think of.

I think especially these young investigator awards, the awards that you get early on, are going to direct the focus of your research for the rest of your career because its at the time when you are still building your laboratory or you are building your projects, and so when you have the ability to really build strongly in a particular area to build those collaborations and to build those research areas I think those are the projects that impact what you are doing over the next twenty-five or thirty years. I think it'll have a huge impact on how my career looks ten or fifteen years out.