In a conversation with the American Cancer Society’s TheoryLab podcast, Eva M. Hernando-Monge, PhD, professor in the Department of Pathology and assistant dean for research integration, and Thales Y. Papagiannakopoulos, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Pathology, both members of NYU Langone Health’s Perlmutter Cancer Center, speak about their research, challenges they face in understanding cancer, and more.

Dr. Hernando-Monge, who studies melanoma metastasis, says there has been a great deal of progress in treating people with melanoma, but there are still people who do not respond to treatment or experience side effects of the treatment.

“When I started working in cancer, I was just looking at the cancer cells. Now I know that this is a very narrow vision, and I need to understand better how the cancer cells talk with their neighbors,” Dr. Hernando-Monge says. “As an investigator, my dream is to understand better those interactions and see how we can attack them to make cancer cells much more vulnerable and much more responsive to the therapies that we have and to new therapies.”

While the focus of Dr. Papagiannakopoulos’s research is lung cancer, he says there is overlap with Dr. Hernando-Monge’s melanoma research and with other investigators at Perlmutter Cancer Center who study other cancers.

“We do often exchange models, and we do exchange tools, to be able to study these processes in both lung cancer and melanoma,” Dr. Papagiannakopoulos says. “And one of the reasons I think we have a fantastic environment at NYU Langone is because of the fact that we’re a very close community, and we communicate very often, and we discuss each other’s science very often, and there’s a lot of synergy and overlap and ability to collaborate.”

Listen to Dr. Hernando-Monge’s and Dr. Papagiannakopoulos’s entire interview on American Cancer Society’s TheoryLab.