Evan Day, a student in Associate Professor Matt Lazzara's lab, is the 2019 winner of the W.H. Peterson Oral Presentation Award given by the Division of Biochemical Technology of the American Chemical Society. The award is for his presentation on work that led to the creation of a new tool to evaluate the in vivo (taking place in a living organism) efficacy of targeted inhibitors for cancer. Evan presented the research, titled “Engineering a bioluminescence-based protein kinase reporter for in vivo, longitudinal studies of receptor tyrosine kinase inhibitor response,” at the division's annual meeting in Orlando, Fla., last spring. The award will be presented at the American Chemical Society Biochemical Technology Division 2020 annual meeting, which will be held in March in Philadelphia.
“The deployment of this tool will lead to better preclinical in vivo data, and greatly reduce the numbers of animals needed to evaluate drug efficacy, at least for a particular class of drugs,” Professor Lazzara said. “The basic design principle behind it may eventually be adapted for use with other types of drugs.”