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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. 2:00 – On his research into the mechanisms of drug resistance for melanoma – “There 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’t do anything to anymore. We’re trying to figure out either new ways we can treat those tumors or ways in which those cancers have become resistant to those drugs.” 3:22 – What it was like to find out he got funded “I 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’re able to do this research more quickly and just that people I guess liked my ideas. 4:45 – Progress the lab has made since the grant was funded – “The thing that I’m most excited about is that we’re 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?” 7:00 – On the community of support around him – “I grew up in Cheltenham, which is a suburb just north of Philadelphia and I’m 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 – it’s really amazing. I’m able to stay in the city I love and the community I love based on other people in my community.” 8:45 – On challenges publishing his work – “We haven’t 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.”