Wilmot Leader Earns $1.5M Grant for Breakthrough Clinical Trial

David Linehan, M.D., chief of clinical operations at the Wilmot Cancer Institute, is the inaugural recipient of a $1.5 million award from Gateway for Cancer Research.
Linehan is an expert investigator for pancreatic cancer, a deadly disease with a five-year survival rate of only about nine percent. The Gateway Discovery Grant for Immunotherapy Research supports Linehan’s early-phase clinical trial combining immunotherapy with a common cocktail of drugs known as Folfirinox for treating patients with pancreatic tumors that cannot be removed.
As a surgeon, much of Linehan’s research focuses on harnessing the immune system to fight pancreas cancer. He and several collaborators also investigate how pancreatic tumors leverage surrounding non-cancer cells in their microenvironment to grow, and how to combine standard treatments with novel immune therapies and radiation, to control the disease.
Linehan serves as the Seymour I. Schwartz Professor and Chair of Surgery at the University of Rochester Medical Center.
The 2020 Gateway Discovery Grant in Immunotherapy Research is a collaboration between Gateway for Cancer Research and Conquer Cancer, the ASCO Foundation, as a scientific partner.