Dannielle Engle is an American biologist and assistant professor of the regulatory biology laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. Engle’s research aims at improving detection and treatment of pancreatic cancer.
Early life and education
Engle started her undergraduate degree at Northwestern University in music as a violinist. She then changed her path to explore biology and conducted undergraduate research in genetics studying fruit flies. Engle graduated from Northwestern with degrees in both biological sciences and asian studies. After her undergraduate degree, Engle pursued graduate school at the University of California San Diego. During this time, Engle lost her father to pancreatic cancer and decided to dedicate her career to pancreatic cancer research. She joined the lab of Dr. Geoffrey M. Walh at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in order to begin her career in cancer biology studying the mammogenesis in stem cells due to the similarity in cellular processes to cancer progression. After graduate school, Engle moved to the United Kingdom to complete her postdoctoral studies under the mentorship of Dr. David Tuveson at the Cambridge Research Institute but she finished her time in the lab back in the United States after helping move the lab to Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory where she held the title of Senior Research Fellow and became a Lustgarten Foundation Pancreatic Cancer Research Laboratory Ambassador through her community outreach efforts. During her postdoctoral studies, Engle focused her efforts on probing a specific carbohydrate antigen, CA19-9, released by pancreatic tumor cells. She also pioneered studies of pancreatic cancer in organoid pancreas models.
Career and research
In 2019, Engle returned to the Salk as an assistant professor. Her lab is focused on improving detection and treatment of pancreatic cancer which has the highest mortality rate of all major cancers. Since starting in 2019, Engle’s lab has begun creating transgenic mouse models of pancreatic cancer that have tumors that express the uniquely human CA19-9 tumor antigen. This will allow the lab to better recapitulate the human tumor environment and move towards better diagnostics and treatments for pancreatic cancer.