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This conversation with Dan Erkes, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow at Thomas Jefferson University, was interesting because he talked, not only about the challenges and opportunities around drug resistance for melanoma, but also about how rewarding it is to conduct research in a community that's actively supporting him.\n\n2:00 \u2013 On his research into the mechanisms of drug resistance for melanoma \u2013 \u201cThere are a lot of new drugs coming out that really help patients in a lot of different ways, but most patients are still developing diseases that the drugs don\u2019t do anything to anymore. We\u2019re trying to figure out either new ways we can treat those tumors or ways in which those cancers have become resistant to those drugs.\u201d\n\n3:22 \u2013 What it was like to find out he got funded \u201cI got two really great things from the phone call. First off, I got feedback from scientific reviewers, which was really helpful for my growing as a scientist. But also, just to know that the grant was funded and to know that, now I have job stability, our lab is now able to hire other people and we\u2019re able to do this research more quickly and just that people I guess liked my ideas.\n\n4:45 \u2013 Progress the lab has made since the grant was funded \u2013 \u201cThe thing that I\u2019m most excited about is that we\u2019re taking tumors that are resistant to these FDA-approved drugs and asking, can we use a BET inhibitor in that situation? If a patient were to fail a drug could they then get a BET inhibitor potentially as a salvage therapy to help them later down the treatment line?\u201d \n\n7:00 \u2013 On the community of support around him \u2013 \u201cI grew up in Cheltenham, which is a suburb just north of Philadelphia and I\u2019m a native Pennsylvanian. Just this idea that there is a group of people out there who have means and are able to give back to the community \u2013 it\u2019s really amazing. I\u2019m able to stay in the city I love and the community I love based on other people in my community.\u201d\n\n8:45 \u2013 On challenges publishing his work \u2013 \u201cWe haven\u2019t necessarily gotten the feedback we were hoping for. Right now the main struggle has been what do we actually add to this project to finish it off, what are the specific things we need to do, because we kept doing a lot of different things that never seem to make the reviewers happy.\u201d