ASCI / Young Physician-Scientist Awards, 2023
The Young Physician-Scientist Awards (YPSA) recognize physician-scientists who are early in their first faculty appointment and have made notable achievements in their research.
About the awardee
As a kidney cancer-focused investigator, Scott M. Haake, MD, PhD leads a research team focused on the study of basic mechanisms of cancer development and progression and seek to actively translate this knowledge into interventions that improve the lives of cancer patients. For example, they have a DOD-funded project that seeks to develop a novel liquid biopsy assay that can be used to estimate tumor burden and investigate tumor biology in a non-invasive and “real-time” manner. These liquid biopsy techniques could be used to characterize response to immunotherapy, monitor patients who have a deep and/or complete response to immunotherapy and wish to discontinue therapy, and detect minimal residual disease and thus prioritize patients for adjuvant therapies. Other DOD-funded studies seek to develop RNAseq-based biomarkers that match approved first line therapies to the unique biology of an individual patient’s tumor, thus testing the hypothesis that this tailored therapy will result in superior clinical outcomes. The DOD and the Kure It Foundation have funded correlative projects to further explore the unique biology of these RNAseq-defined tumor subtypes. Other DOD funding seeks to train artificial intelligence to identify immune cell infiltrates and predict for immune response using simple H&E images of human tumors. The focus of Dr. Haake's NCI K08 award is to study the role of extracellular matrix (ECM) signaling during tumor initiation and evolution. Early data from this work demonstrate that cancer cells exhibit constitutive, ligand-independent activation of ECM receptors, and this signaling is required for tumor initiation. Dr. Haake's research has been published in peer-reviewed journals including Cell, The New England Journal of Medicine, Cancer Cell, Cancer, Clinical Cancer Research, and others. As a board-certified medical oncologist, he has a kidney cancer-focused clinic and cares for patients at both Vanderbilt University Medical Center and the Nashville VA Hospital.