Salk Institute Professor Diana Hargreaves was named a 2025 All-Star Translational Award Program grantee by the V Foundation for Cancer Research. The award comes as a recognition of Hargreaves' exceptional success with her previous V Foundation grant in 2016, which aimed to identify better drug targets for cancers with mutations in a multi-protein complex called SWI/SNF that regulates DNA structure and stability. She and her collaborator, Gregory Botta, an associate professor at UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center, will receive $1 million to advance her new project to improve immunotherapy-a treatment that utilizes the body's own immune cells to fight cancer-in patients with pancreatic cancer.
Diana is a true innovator in the field of cancer research, and this second award from the V Foundation is a testament to her continued scientific excellence. We enthusiastically support her efforts to translate the fundamental discoveries she has made regarding immune checkpoint blockade to the treatment of pancreatic cancer, which thus far has been challenging to address with immunotherapy."
Gerald Joyce, Salk President
The V Foundation was founded by ESPN and national basketball champion and coach Jim Valvano to fund "game-changing" cancer research grants in North America. The foundation's competitive selection process identifies scientists like Hargreaves who are using cutting-edge approaches to tackle cancer in innovative ways.
V Foundation All-Star awards reinvest in previous grant recipients. Hargreaves' first V Foundation project in 2016 aimed to find new strategies for treating epithelial ovarian cancers with mutations in ARID1A, a protein in the SWI/SNF complex. Her new project, titled "Preclinical and Clinical Studies of Immune Checkpoint Inhibitor Therapy in SWI/SNF Altered or Inhibited Pancreatic Cancer," explores the role of this same protein complex in pancreatic cancer.
Pancreatic cancer is set to become the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths in the United States by 2030. Due to its high mortality rate-roughly 90% of patients-the need to develop effective therapies for pancreatic cancer is urgent. Immunotherapies such as immune checkpoint inhibitors have revolutionized cancer care for other cancer types but have been generally ineffective in the pancreas-except, notably, in patients with SWI/SNF mutations, for whom Botta found that immunotherapy is far more effective.
Already, Hargreaves' discoveries have revealed that ARID1A mutations make immunotherapy more effective for people with difficult-to-treat cancers. Hargreaves will now investigate whether the immunotherapy-boosting effect of mutated ARID1A extends to SWI/SNF mutations more generally, as well as test whether SWI/SNF-blocking drugs could improve clinical outcomes for the 85-90% of patients with unmutated SWI/SNF tumors. In parallel, Botta will run an investigator-initiated trial of combination immunotherapy and chemotherapy for metastatic pancreatic cancer patients with SWI/SNF mutations. Collectively, these studies could help define biomarkers for immunotherapy in pancreatic cancer and boost patient survival.
These studies build upon a collaborative grant awarded to Botta and Hargreaves through Curebound. Hargreaves was named the American Cancer Society's Early-Career Researcher of the Year in 2024 and a Pew-Stewart Scholar for Cancer Research in 2019. She is also a leader in Salk's new Neuroimmunology Initiative.
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