Eli CahanScience’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Pulitzer Center.Early this year, University of Colorado, Denver, cancer researcher Patricia Ernst was thrilled when her postdoc Therese Vu won a grant from the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, a nonprofit that has pumped more than $1.2 billion into blood cancer research since its founding in 1949.
The funding would allow the scientists to launch studies using a technique to generate malignant leukemia from immature blood cells—an approach that Ernst had been eager to try for more than a decade.
To hit the ground running, they journeyed to Vancouver, Canada, for 1 week to learn the technique, and developed a pipeline for novel reagents through a University of Michigan lab.