It’s three minutes before the keynote at the 2025 Spring Research Festival, and the seats are filling up. Chatter thrums through the room. Somewhere within the stir, someone is talking about tumors. A voice at the back keeps mentioning malaria. Like the whirl of hushed conversations, the burgeoning audience is an amalgam.

After hours at the microscope, Sebastian Temme, Ph.D., was at a loss. The bacterial structures he’d been examining weren’t arranged the way he expected they’d be. He and his colleagues initially feared they’d done the experiment wrong, but they soon realized they’d latched onto something fascinating.

Imagine, for a moment, that you’re a scientist studying ways to combat a rare form of cancer that overwhelmingly manifests in a specific group of people. You suspect a series of genetic mutations. Testing for the presence of those alterations one at a time would involve a prohibitive amount of time and money. What you need is a database of thousands of cancer cases, characterized for genetic data, to which you could compare your cases. Enter NCI’s Genomic Data Commons.

Imagine a heavy roof propped up by slender pillars. Now imagine knocking down one of those pillars. The others buckle under the weight, and soon the whole thing comes crashing down. NCI Frederick scientists, with collaborators from the National Institutes of Health, industry, and academia, have achieved something similar in laboratory models of head and neck squamous cell carcinoma, a group of mouth, throat, and nasal cavity cancers with life-altering complications.

Werner H. Kirsten student interns Taylor Johnson and Isabella Pressimone, who worked with Occupational Health Services (OHS), demonstrated both leadership and compassion this spring by organizing a fundraiser titled “Spring Into Wins” on behalf of the Recreation and Welfare Club Frederick (R&WCF). The initiative raised over $1,000 for three organizations dedicated to helping children who have cancer. This project was more than a fundraising event—it was a powerful learning experience that deepened the interns’ awareness of the challenges faced by pediatric cancer patients and their families.