June 29, 2015
Dr. James Moon has been selected to receive the 2015 Young Investigator Award by the Melanoma Research Alliance.

James Moon, PhD, has been selected to receive the 2015 Young Investigator Award by the Melanoma Research Alliance (MRA). In recognition of an urgent need of effective options for melanoma patients and those at risk, MRA is supporting Dr. Moon's melanoma immunotherapy research with a grant of $225,000 over 3 years.

The Young Investigator program aims to attract early career scientists with novel ideas into melanoma research, thereby recruiting and supporting the next generation of melanoma researchers. Young Investigators are scientists within four years of their first academic faculty appointment. Dr. Moon, who joined the College in 2012, is the John Gideon Searle Assistant Professor at the U-M College of Pharmacy, as well as Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the U-M College of Engineering. James was previously honored with the 2012 NIH K22 Research Scholar Development Award, 2011 IEEE-EMBS Harvard Wyss Institute Award for Translational Research, and 2010 Young Investigator Award (Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine International Society). His research interests include nanotechnology, biomaterials, drug delivery systems, cancer immunotherapy, and vaccine design and development. With an interdisciplinary focus, Dr. Moon aims to develop new drug delivery systems that can enhance targeting of antigen and adjuvant to lymphoid organs, thereby manipulating immune functions in the context of cancer, infectious diseases, and autoimmunity.

Development of a successful immunotherapy against melanoma has been an elusive goal. One of the major hurdles in cancer immunotherapy is the limited capacity of the conventional vaccine adjuvants to elicit potent anti-tumoral T-cell responses. “My lab's long-range goal is to develop improved immunotherapies for cancer patients,” says Dr. Moon. “As the next step towards this goal, our objective is to construct a new vaccine delivery system that can generate potent anti-tumoral immune responses against metastatic and recurrent melanomas. Toward this goal, we recently developed a new vaccine nanoparticle system that can stably deliver antigens and immunostimulatory agents to dendritic cells (DCs), promote cross-presentation of antigens, and generate drastically enhanced T and B cell responses, compared with conventional adjuvants and DC-based vaccines. We propose to harness the tremendous potential of our vaccine strategy to achieve robust immune responses against metastatic and recurrent melanomas,” continues Dr. Moon.  

The Young Investigator Award is part of the Melanoma Research Alliance’s 2015 $13 million new grant initiative. Since its founding in 2007, MRA, which directs 100% of funds raised to research, has provided more than $67 million to fund melanoma research. Learn more about MRA’s Young Investigator Award and their total 2015 grant awards.