LOS ANGELES, Aug 7: Stand Up To Cancer has announced that Caitlin Zebley, MD, PhD, of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, is the recipient of the 2026 SU2C Maverick Early Career Scientist Award.
The SU2C Maverick Award is specifically for researchers in the early stages of their careers whose work has a strong likelihood of having a major impact on people with cancer. The winner, selected each year at the annual SU2C Scientific Summit, receives a grant of Dollar 100,000 for research to be conducted over the following 12-month period.
The funding from the 2026 Maverick Award will support Dr. Zebley’s ongoing research focused on developing effective CAR T-cell therapies for children with acute myelogenous leukemia. Much of this research has been performed in collaboration with SU2C-funded researcher Benjamin Youngblood, PhD, of the Department of Immunology, and other St. Jude scientists.
“It’s very exciting to win the Maverick Award,” Dr. Zebley said. “For younger investigators, receiving awards and grant funding of this caliber provides tremendous momentum to your career.”
About 20% of the childhood leukemias diagnosed each year in the United States are AML, with B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia accounting for most other U.S. leukemia cases. Although not to the same degree as with ALL, outcomes in children with AML have improved substantially over the past several decades, with 65%-70% now living for 5 years or longer. However, the long-term prognosis can be poor for children whose cancer returns after their initial treatment, with multiple factors influencing the therapies that are used and how well they work.
“We care for many AML patients who have undergone extensive treatment journeys,” Dr. Zebley said. “When they come to us, they may have already received multiple therapies, including bone marrow transplants. It’s an exceptionally challenging disease.”
CAR T-cell therapy—which uses genetically engineered versions of patients’ own T cells—is already a standard treatment for children with B-cell ALL that has returned after their initial treatments. But, to date, CAR T-cell therapy has not worked well in children with AML.
Dr. Zebley helped discover a way of potentially preventing or reversing a phenomenon called T-cell exhaustion that can limit or altogether undercut CAR T cells’ ability to attack tumors. In a recent collaboration with St. Jude colleagues Swati Naik, MBBS, and Paulina Velasquez, MD, the researchers found that T cells in children with AML have epigenetic changes that are associated with exhaustion, potentially explaining why CAR T-cell therapy has failed in these patients. In lab-based experiments, however, they also found that experimental drugs called DNMT1 inhibitors could reverse T cell exhaustion.
As Dr. Zebley explained, the Maverick Award funding will help to further advance this work, supporting studies aimed at better understanding how to potentially use DNMT1 inhibitors to “rejuvenate” exhausted T cells. If successful, this work could make cellular therapy an effective treatment option for children with AML.
“We’d be able to treat patients’ T cells with something that reverses this epigenetic repression, creating a highly functional population for CAR T-cell therapy,” she said.