The Louisiana Cancer Research Center’s mission includes training and education programs to cultivate the next generation of our state’s cancer researchers. The LCRC's Cancer Research Training & Education Coordination (CRTEC) program awards travel grants to undergraduate students, graduate students, and postdoctoral trainees to enrich their LCRC- affiliated laboratory work and introduce them to nationally respected research conferences.

Three recipients describe how they utilized their travel award to further their research and development, in this video transcript:

Ashley Martier-Heck, PhD, Xavier University of Louisiana:

My work involves making models to validate new classes ofdrugs for lung cancer. And it's a really great collaborative project that spans across the LCRC and Xavier.  I was able to go present my research at the American Society for Cell Biology in Philadelphia in December of 2025. It was an exceptional opportunity to meet researchers and collaborators from acrossthe country, many of whom I've kept in touch with and who we're collaborating with now here at Xavier.

Patricia Snarski, PhD, Tulane University:

We don't know why there's more colon cancer occurring now,but we think that obesity has something to do with it. So we are trying to develop new therapeutics that will help patients that are obese because they do not respond to the current therapies. Thanks to LCRC Travel Award, I was able to attend American Gastroenterological Association Digestive Disease Week in2024 conference. where I was able to present my data and meet a lot of new collaborators.

Mrityunjoy Biswas, PhD. LSU Health New Orleans:

I attended the AACR annual meeting 2026, San Diego, and there I presented my work on triple negative breast cancer. Essentially I used Notch 1 as a therapeutic to treat TNBC. In this work we used adenine-associated virus encoding Notch 1 decoy, and this notch decoy significantly suppressed the TNBC tumor growth in vitro and in vivo.

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