PHILADELPHIA (August 25, 2025) — Researchers at Fox Chase Cancer Center received a prestigious Director’s Discretionary Allocation Award from Argonne National Laboratory, part of the U.S. Department of Energy. The allocation supports the Melanoma-Immune Checkpoint Blockade project (ICB), a Fox Chase initiative aimed at advancing research in melanoma immunotherapy.
“These blockades are a type of immunotherapy that includes three antibody-based treatments for advanced melanoma. The problem is we don’t really know which treatment will be effective for a specific patient. The goal with this project is to find more quantitative molecular-level biomarkers that can predict if a certain treatment will work for that patient,” said Hayan Lee, PhD, an Assistant Professor in the Nuclear Dynamics and Cancer Research Program at Fox Chase.
Lee, who is also a member Fox Chase’s Cancer Epigenetics Institute, co-leads the Melanoma-ICB project with Alfonso Bellacosa, MD, PhD, a member of the institute and a Professor in the Nuclear Dynamics and Cancer Research Program. The Argonne National Laboratory is a federally funded research and development center in Illinois.
In addition to identifying biomarkers for ICB based on DNA methylation, the Fox Chase project aims to improve prediction models by compiling larger datasets that include more varied types of biological data. These biological data include important molecules like RNA, as well as 3D genomes, which can help researchers understand gene expression and disease impact and further inform therapy decisions for patients.
The project began just over a year ago with initial funding from the Melanoma Research Alliance, the world’s largest source of private nonprofit funding for melanoma research. The organization provided Fox Chase researchers with support for essential experimental work that accompanied the computational research.
Anthony Olszanski, MD, RPh, Co-Director of the Melanoma and Skin Cancer Program and Chief of Solid Tumor Oncology at Fox Chase, is the clinical collaborator for this project. Two Fox Chase facilities — the Biosample Repository Facility and the Genomic Resource Facility — are providing critical support for the project.
Now, with allocations from Argonne, Fox Chase researchers will also have access to the world-class computing and storage infrastructure of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF). With this access, researchers can accelerate computational modeling and analysis of immune checkpoint blockade mechanisms in melanoma.
The award includes allotted time on ALCF’s high-performance computing system to support large-scale simulations and data-intensive research, along with dedicated storage to manage the substantial data generated by the project.
“This opportunity to leverage Argonne’s cutting-edge computational resources marks a significant step forward in our efforts to better understand and improve cancer immunotherapy,” said Lee. “We are deeply grateful to them for their generous support of our work and look forward to the discoveries this allocation will enable.”