PhD Student Mostafa Nasr Receives AACR Scholar-in-Training Award

Congratulations to Mostafa Nasr, a Moffitt/USF Cancer Biology PhD student in the lab of Dr. Conor Lynch, who was selected to receive the AACR Scholar-in-Training Award. Scholar-in-Training Awards are highly competitive and recognize outstanding young investigators presenting meritorious proffered papers at the AACR Annual Meeting. The award will facilitate Mostafa’s attendance at AACR held in San Diego, California.

The title of Mostafa’s presentation is “PRDM16 is an intrinsic regulator of dormancy in bone disseminated prostate cancer cells.” Cancer cell dormancy is a clinically significant problem, in which cancer cells that have spread to distant tissues can lay dormant for months or years only to suddenly reawaken as an active metastatic disease. 

For prostate cancer, these metastases typically arise in the skeleton where they greatly contribute to patient mortality. Approximately 35,250 men will die from prostate cancer in the U.S. alone in 2024 and more than 90% will have bone metastases. Therefore, understanding the mechanisms that govern prostate cancer cell dormancy in the bone microenvironment can reveal actionable therapeutic targets which will be paramount to enhancing long-term survival of prostate cancer patients.

Mostafa has found PRDM16, a protein-coding gene, to be a key regulator of prostate cancer cell dormancy and has dedicated his doctoral phase in the laboratory of Dr. Lynch to understand how this novel transcription factor controls the dormancy program.

Join us in congratulating Mostafa Nasr for receiving this outstanding award due to his outstanding work!