Balyn Zaro, PhD, has spent years challenging a basic assumption about how cells get the proteins they need. Now, with more than $2 million in new funding from the National Institutes of Health, the UCSF School of Pharmacy researcher will have five years to explore what that discovery could reveal about one of cancer’s most stubborn accomplices: the macrophage.

Zaro, an associate professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, is one of four UCSF faculty members named to the 2026 class of NIH New Innovators, part of the NIH Common Fund’s High-Risk, High-Reward Research program. The award supports early-career scientists pursuing bold ideas that could open new directions in biomedical research.

Zaro’s research centers on macrophages, immune cells whose normal job is to recognize and consume damaged or foreign material. In some solid tumors, however, macrophages can become so abundant and so altered that they effectively help the cancer survive and grow.

Zaro has discovered that macrophages can acquire proteins from other cells and put those stolen proteins to use — a finding that challenges the conventional view that a cell’s proteins are determined solely by its own gene expression. With the support of the New Innovator award, she will investigate whether this unexpected form of protein acquisition helps turn macrophages from defenders of the body into collaborators with tumors, and whether that process can be reversed.

For Zaro and her colleagues at the school, the award creates an opportunity to pursue a high-risk scientific question with potentially broad implications for understanding cancer biology and developing new therapeutic strategies.