I remember my dad when he was coaching us in football, we all made T shirts that said effort is everything. And that's really also what I tell the people that I train in the lab is that, you know, your effort is everything in this mission.

My name is Daniel Hollern. I'm an assistant professor at the Salk Institute in the Salk Cancer Center.

I grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It's on the west side of the state. I grew up in a very large family. As the oldest of seven kids who were all really connected to our grandparents and our cousins.

I played a lot of sports growing up. Really taught you how in science you have to work together as a team. And everybody's unique talents can be leveraged to help achieve much more. And I thought that those experiences were critical for starting to develop just the tendencies that you need in life to be a good leader but also a good team player.

I remember coming to my guidance counselor after my grandfather was diagnosed with cancer. And I realized that I really wanted to switch the focus of what I was studying and what I would pursue in my career. So yeah, at first I wanted to be an orthopaedic surgeon, but having my hero diagnosed with cancer and not knowing anything about what might happen to him and how he ended up in this place just really created this emotional stir that I just couldn't be satisfied with doing anything else but pursuing the research that might be able to help him.

When I was interviewing for the PhD program at Michigan State University, which was where I was sure I wanted to go because I was going to buy tickets with my grandpa and all of those things. During the interview, we were going around the table and everybody was saying, you know, what are their plans for their PhD? What were they going to do next?

And so we're going around the table and everybody's saying postdoc, I'm going to postdoc. But I didn't know what a postdoc was.

I came into this field just very naive. I just knew I wanted to do cancer research and I was going to work harder than I ever could to make sure that that happened. So I remember when it came to me and I said I was going to start a laboratory. Everybody looked at me like I was crazy.

The other faculty that were there just thought I was very ambitious. But everybody else was like, what is this guy talking about? And so I remember they had us with roommates. And so I remember after dinner I'm asking my roommate what's a postdoc? And he's telling me what this is. And I thought I was doing that, like I was not going to get an offer to this PhD program. I called my parents. Now, it's like I really messed up. I got to, you know, prepare harder for the next interview. And I remember that Monday when I got the call that I was being admitted into the program, I just ran down the driveway celebrating and I couldn't wait to tell my parents. Couldn't wait to tell my grandparents. It was it was really a dream come true that because I knew that I had a foot in the door to start this mission of doing cancer research.

My research is really focused on providing cures for patients that currently have no options. And the reason that I believe that we can do this is we all have an immune system. Some of our immune systems work very well. And other people, they have dysfunctional immune systems, and many of those people with dysfunctional immune systems have cancer.

What we need to do is just really correct these imbalances in our immune system and tell them how to start to, again, recognize these cancer cells and take care of them and eliminate them from the body. The research to date and the clinical outcomes are showing that this is possible.

And my lab's research is contributing to this momentum by adding a new ingredient to the equation. We studied this other immune cell that has a very unique capacity to educate T cells on how to attack cancer. But they also have another way of bringing in many other parts of the immune system into the battle. And their ability to amplify an immune response and gain much more coverage over the targets that are present on cancer cells, makes them a very unique vehicle and opportunity to treat cancer in a much more effective and robust way.

We are really excited about what our research is telling us for the potential and the future of clinical cancer care. And I really think that B cells are going to be a critical part of that equation. And our research shows that this is really key to driving this very effective anti tumor immune response.