MARCH 4, 2026, NEW YORK - Ludwig Cancer Research is proud to announce that Director of the Oxford Branch of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research Xin Lu and the Institute's CEO and Scientific Director Chi Van Dang are co-recipients of a 2026 Cancer Grand Challenges award as members of the ATLAS (for Antibody Tracking for Long-term Avoidance and Surveillance) team.
Launched in 2020 by Cancer Research UK and the U.S. National Cancer Institute, Cancer Grand Challenges invites scientists to collaborate across borders and disciplines to devise innovative approaches to solving some of the most perplexing and important problems of cancer biology and care. The initiative, which issued up to $125 million to five teams from 34 institutions in nine countries this year, now supports some 1,800 researchers participating in 21 active teams, each assigned to one of 18 towering challenges of cancer research and care. Many of the teams are also supported by outside funders. Team ATLAS, in particular, is funded by Cancer Research UK and the Torrey Coast Foundation through Cancer Grand Challenges.
Lu and Dang are members of an international team of nine principal investigators led by Paul Bastard of Institut IMAGINE in Paris. The team, whose proposal addresses the challenge of "Cancer Avoidance", will receive up to $25 million over approximately five years to develop a Cancer Antibody Atlas to explore how a subset of the aged and people thought to be predisposed to cancer for various reasons ultimately evade malignant disease.
Cancer immunotherapy, a pillar of cancer treatment made possible by a recent revolution in biomedical research, has already saved many lives. Its activation and deployment of T cells-which can recognize and kill cancer cells-to beat back tumors has proved effective against several types of cancer. Still, many fail to benefit from existing cancer immunotherapies.
The other arm of the adaptive immune system, which involves B cells and is perhaps best known for its part in vaccine responses, plays a role in anti-tumor immunity as well. B cells make a dizzying array of antibodies to fight off infections and can produce antibodies against real dangers, like cancer cells, as well as misperceived ones, such as healthy cells or any of the body's numerous free-floating molecules.
These antibodies, and the corresponding B cells that produce each of them, persist in the blood. As such, they collectively represent a kind of serological memory bank whose vast deposits include events and biochemical phenomena associated with cancer incidence, avoidance and therapeutic efficacy. The ATLAS team aims to discover antibodies that open unforeseen avenues for early detection, prevention and treatment of cancer by building a Cancer Antibody Atlas based on studies involving more than 10,000 individuals.
"We are very excited about venturing into this largely unexplored domain of cancer biology and confident that our findings will yield advances in not only the diagnosis and treatment of cancer but possibly toward the Holy Grail of prevention as well," said Dang, who is also Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Cancer Medicine at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
To mine serological memory, Team ATLAS will employ novel protein profiling technologies to capture telltale patterns linking antibody repertoires and disease states of people in a variety of large and well-characterized cohorts. These include centenarians who have escaped cancer diagnoses, discordant identical and fraternal twins-in which only one has been diagnosed with cancer-patients at high risk for malignant disease, pediatric and adult patients with current and prior cancer diagnoses as well as a control cohort of healthy young people at low risk for cancer.
Team ATLAS will seek out antibodies that bind to a broad range of antigens-the molecular targets of these exquisitely precise guided missiles-such as those that directly stimulate the destruction of cancer cells or are associated with a productive T cell response to cancer. The researchers will also look for antibodies the body produces against its own cells and secreted molecules, or autoantibodies. Such antibodies have already been shown to influence outcomes of checkpoint blockade immunotherapy and likely have many currently unknown effects on tumor growth and survival. The team will, further, catalog antibodies to pathogens, commensal microbes (like gut bacteria), food and a range of other exposures that correlate with cancer incidence or are associated with therapeutic outcomes.
"Our discoveries on the role of these antibodies in cancer biology will be validated through collaborative studies employing preclinical models and should reveal previously unknown and potentially exploitable mechanisms by which the immune system detects and eliminates tumors," said Lu, who is also a professor of cancer biology at the University of Oxford.
With this award, Ludwig Institute scientists are now involved in two currently active Cancer Grand Challenges teams. The second is the CANCAN team, which is co-led by Ludwig Princeton Associate Director Eileen White and has since 2022 been investigating cachexia, a wasting condition associated with advanced cancers that worsens patient prognosis and remains generally resistant to treatment.
A video prepared by Johns Hopkins communications in which Dang discusses the ATLAS team's initiative is available here.
A second video, featuring Lu and produced by Ludwig Oxford, is available here.
