Amy Erbe-Gurel, PhD, assistant professor, Division of Hematology, Oncology, and Bone Marrow Transplant, was awarded a Hartwell Individual Biomedical Research Award from the Hartwell Foundation. Erbe-Gurel’s project, “Inhibitors to Epigenetic Modifiers Improve the Efficacy of Immunotherapy Against High-Risk Neuroblastoma,” will experiment with using drugs that inhibit or block epigenetic modifiers to slow growth in neuroblastoma and restore major histocompatibility complex I (MHCI) expression, enabling immune cells introduced by immunotherapy to recognize and destroy the cancer. Approximately 800 children in the U.S. are diagnosed with neuroblastoma every year, and nearly half of these patients have “high-risk” disease, which is associated with a less than 50% survival rate. The $300,000 grant will run for three years and began on May 1, 2024.