Who We Fund

Albert Einstein College of Medicine

Dr. Konopleva is a Director of the Acute Leukemia Program and a Co-Director of the Translational Blood Cancer Institute at Einstein/Montefiore Cancer Center, NY. The PI is a physician-scientist with an active clinical practice where she treats MDS/AML patients on a routine basis outpatient and inpatient. She directs laboratory studying at understanding the pathogenesis and chemoresistance of AML and MDS stem/progenitor cells, with focus on metabolic and apoptosis regulators. Dr. Konopleva has joined Montefiore-Einstein in summer 2022 after long successful career as a physician-scientist at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. She has brought multiple targeted agents from pre-clinical investigations into clinical trials, most notable BCL-2 inhibitor Venetoclax which in combination with low-intensity therapies has become a standard of care for older AML patients unfit for intensive chemotherapy and is being studied in high-risk MDS.

Program Name(s)

Discovery

Project Title

Targeting metabolic reprogramming in MDS and AML stem/progenitor cells

University of Colorado Denver, Anschutz Medical Campus

As a physician-scientist dedicated to advancing treatments for multiple myeloma, I lead a translational research program focused on understanding drug resistance and developing new therapies. I completed my MD/PhD training under Dr. Brian Druker, whose work on BCR-ABL inhibitors revolutionized leukemia care, and my thesis investigated mechanisms of imatinib resistance. During fellowship, I focused on antibody-based therapeutics in the laboratory of Dr. Bin Liu, where I helped develop an anti-CD46 antibody-drug conjugate that showed single-agent activity in a phase I myeloma trial. Since joining the University of Colorado faculty, I have received awards including an NCCN Young Investigator Award, NCI K08, and American Cancer Society Research Scholar Award. My current research centers on mechanisms of resistance to T cell–redirecting therapies, including CAR T cells and bispecific antibodies, with the goal of improving outcomes for patients with multiple myeloma.

Program Name(s)

Translational Research Program

Project Title

Improving CAR T Outcomes Through Early T Cell Collection in Multiple Myeloma

The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center

Koichi Takahashi, MD, PhD is Associate Professor in the Departments of Leukemia and Genomic Medicine at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. He received MD degree from Niigata University School of Medicine and PhD degree from Kyoto University School of Medicine, both in Japan. He then did internal medicine residency at Toranomon Hospital, Tokyo, Japan, and Beth Israel Medical Center in New York, followed by hematology and oncology fellowship at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. During the fellowship, he was trained in Dr. Andrew Futreal’s Lab for cancer genomics. He is board certified in Internal Medicine, Hematology, and Medical Oncology. Dr. Takahashi is well known for his research in delineating how selection of pre-existing clonal hematopoiesis under chemotherapy contributes to the development of therapy-related myeloid neoplasms. His laboratory uses state-of-the-art single-cell technologies to understand the mechanism of leukemia development and create strategies for early detection and prevention.

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

Project Title

Understanding the clonal origin, evolution, and progression of myeloid malignancies

Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania

Jalpa Doshi, PhD, is a Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and Director of Value Based Insurance Design Initiatives at the Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics. Her research program aims to advance our understanding of how pharmaceuticals can be better accessed and utilized in the health care system to improve health outcomes while balancing costs. She has been a national leader in applying powerful health economics, outcomes research, and policy methods to address issues related to pharmaceutical access, costs, outcomes, and value. Her research has received widespread attention from the media including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and has directly influenced policies of public and private insurers. For example, she was the first to produce rigorous empirical research advocating for the closure of the “donut hole” (executed under the Affordable Care Act) and institution of an annual out-of-pocket maximum with “smoothing” (executed under the Inflation Reduction Act) under Medicare Part D. Her work documenting negative consequences of cost sharing among veterans was cited in arguments that kept the VA from increasing drug copayments. Her research on the burden of prior authorization policies for novel cholesterol-lowering agents was used to work with national insurers to appropriately reduce their policy restrictions. In recognition of her work, she has received numerous awards and honors from national and international organizations.

Program Name(s)

Equity in Access

Project Title

Impact of Insurance Type and Cost Sharing on Equity in Access to Oral Anticancer Medications for Blood Cancers

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

Dr. Treon is a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Bing Center for Waldenstrom’s Macroglobulinemia (WM) at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. He is a physician scientist with extensive laboratory and clinical trial experience in WM. His laboratory discovered the MYD88 and CXCR4 mutations in WM, and his team has spent over a decade delineating their pro-survival signaling cascades and impact on treatment outcomes in WM. Dr. Treon’s laboratory and clinical trial efforts enabled the investigation of BTK-inhibitors and regulatory approvals of ibrutinib and zanubrutinib for WM. Drs. Treon and Nathanel Gray co-founded a medicinal chemistry working group to develop compounds that selectively target MYD88 signaling. His laboratory supported the signaling, efficacy and toxicology studies that have advanced many new kinase inhibitors and proteolysis targeting chimera that target mutated MYD88 signaling.

Program Name(s)

Translational Research Program

Project Title

Targeting mutated MYD88 pro-survival signaling in B-cell malignancies

Targeting mutated MYD88 signaling in B-cell malignancies

University of Southampton

Professor Francesco Forconi is a leading clinician-scientist at the University of Southampton, UK. Internationally recognized for his clinical and scientific work on B-cell cancers, including HCL. He leads the Southampton designated Center of Excellence for HCL and contributes to UK and international guidelines on HCL diagnosis and management. He leads the Cancer B-cell Group, investigating novel therapeutic approaches against the survival signals mediated by the essential B-cell receptor and BCL2 in B-cell cancers, including HCL. He is the UK lead for the CRUK ECRIN-M3 consortium on early cancer interception. With over 180 peer-reviewed publications, Francesco has spearheaded numerous interventional and observational clinical trials and collaborates closely with patient advocacy groups to enhance care and data platforms. His leadership spans academic, clinical, and policy domains, including roles in NICE appraisals, editorial boards, and cancer science forums.

Program Name(s)

Research Accelerator for Follicular Lymphoma

Hairy Cell Leukemia Research Initiative

Project Title

Investigating the tumor-unique mannose-lectin interaction for a novel diagnostic, prognostic and therapeutic antibody approach of follicular lymphoma

A Phase 2 Open Label Trial of Sonrotoclax in Combination With Zanubrutinib in Patients With Relapsed/Refractory Hairy Cell Leukaemia

TAP Partner

AvenCell Therapeutics is a clinical-stage biotechnology company developing next-generation allogeneic CAR-T cell therapies for blood cancers. The company’s technology combines healthy donor-derived, gene-edited T cells with a switchable targeting system designed to give physicians greater control over CAR-T activity. Unlike traditional CAR-T therapies that are manufactured individually from a patient's own cells, AvenCell's approach is designed to provide an off-the-shelf therapy that can be available when patients need treatment.

Program Name(s)

Therapy Acceleration Program

Project Title

A phase 1b expansion study of AVC-201, an allogeneic switchable CAR-T targeting CD123, in patients with AML

A phase 1 study of AVC-203, a dual-targeting CD19/CD20 allogeneic CAR-T, in patients with B-cell malignancies

Sloan Kettering Institute for Cancer Research

Jae Park, MD is an Attending Physician and Chief of Cellular Therapy Service, and a Director of Adult Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia Program at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Dr. Park has written over 100 peer-reviewed articles appearing in New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, Nature Medicine, Science Translational Medicine, Blood, Cancer Discovery and Journal of Clinical Oncology focused on developing effective and safe targeted and immunotherapies and conducting translational studies. To this end, he has successfully conducted over 15 investigator-initiated therapeutic trials in the field of hematologic malignancies and cellular therapy with grant supports from ASH, LLS, ASCO, AACR and NCCN. He is widely recognized as one of the world experts in the field of CAR T cell therapies and ALL and is the leading PI of clinical trials in patients with ALL and CLL/NHL using CAR T, NK cell therapies, BiTEs, IDCs, targeted agents, and immunomodulators.

Program Name(s)

Academic Clinical Trials Program (ACT)

Hairy Cell Leukemia Research Initiative

Project Title

IL7 receptor-targeted CAR T-cell Therapy for T-Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (T-ALL)

Developing novel therapeutic approaches for classical and variant hairy cell leukemia

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Research

Qian Zhang is a postdoctoral fellow in the Dr. Abdel-Wahab’s lab at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. She developed synthetic introns to selectively targeting U2AF1 mutated myeloid cells. U2AF1 mutations characterize high risk forms of MDS and are also common in elderly patients with AML. She aims to optimize these synthetic introns and develop novel lipid nanoparticles delivery of the synthetic introns into mice. Qian received her Ph.D. training in the Dr. Krainer lab at Cold spring harbor laboratory, where she developed novel RNA therapeutics to target a driver mutation of a deadly pediatric brain tumor known as Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Gliomas. This work was published in Science Translational Medicine with Qian as a first author. She also contributed to the development of innovative RNA therapeutics to modulate RNA splicing in cystic fibrosis. Qian is a key coauthor for these studies that were published in papers in Nucleic Acids Research, PNAS, and Nature Communications.

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

Project Title

Synthetic introns to target U2AF1 mutant leukemias and dissect molecular basis for mis-splicing

The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

I am an assistant professor of oncology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine where I treat patients suffering from leukemias and lymphomas. In my clinical practice, I experience firsthand the lack of treatment options and the poor outcomes in patients with relapsed T cell leukemias and T cell lymphomas. Therefore, my laboratory research focuses on the development of new therapies for the treatment of these T cell cancers. Using my background in T cell biology (Paul et al Immunity 2012, Paul et al Science Signaling 2014) and my collaborators expertise in antibody design, I developed therapies that selectively kill T cell cancers and spare the majority of normal T cells (Paul et al. Sci. Transl. Med. 2021). My goal is to conduct the preclinical validation of the T cell cancer targeting therapies so they can be tested in patients through early phase clinical trials. We hope that our novel therapies will provide new treatment options and improve survival in patients with T cell leukemias and lymphomas.

Program Name(s)

Translational Research Program

Project Title

TCR-directed immunotoxins and antibody drug conjugates for the treatment of T cell malignancies

NYU Grossman School of Medicine

I am a translational lymphoma researcher and associate professor at the NYU Perlmutter Cancer Center (PCC). My research focuses on the relationship between lymphoma, microenvironment, and systemic immunity. I lead an R01 funded study of the microbiome in DLBCL, and and serve as PI on a multi-investigator R01 investigating new immune strategies for CAR T cells. I have presented data on immune profiling in Hodgkin lymphoma (HL) at national and international meetings. Clinically, I have led the effort to integrate immune based approaches into lymphoma therapy, through development of the intergroup Phase 2 protocol E4412 combining brentuximab, nivolumab, and ipilimumab in relapsed HL. I have obtained funding for my research from: the NCI, the ACS, the Lymphoma Research Foundation, Doris Duke (internally awarded), and the NCI Clinical Investigator Team Leader Award for my work with ECOG-ACRIN. My expertise in lymphoma immunology makes me well qualified to lead this current project.

Program Name(s)

Translational Research Program

Project Title

T cell Memory in Cure of Diffuse Large B Cell Lymphoma: An Investigation of the Immune Interactome

Weill Cornell Medicine

Ramon Massoni-Badosa, PhD is a graduate of Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona in 2023, and his PhD focused on applying single-cell genomics technologies to benchmark the effect of sample preservation in single-cell RNA-seq data (Massoni-Badosa R. Genome Biol 2020), create a single-cell-driven atlas of cell types in human tonsils (Massoni-Badosa R., Immunity in press), and track the clonal evolution of CLL to Richter's syndrome (Nadeu,* Royo,* Massoni-Badosa*, Playa-Albinyana*, Garcia-Torre* Nat Med 2022). As highlighted in these three publications, he has gained extensive experience in large-scale single-cell multi-omics projects, as well as in combining computational and biological knowledge to gain biological and clinical insights. During his postdoc in the ten Hacken and Landau labs, Ramon will leverage his expertise to improve the mechanistic understanding of Richter’s syndrome, with the ultimate goal of identifying new targets to treat this incurable disease.

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

Project Title

Uncovering MGA-driven epigenetic reprogramming in Richter's syndrome