Who We Fund

University of Iceland

Professor Sigurður Yngvi Kristinsson is currently consolidating his position as one of the leading researchers world-wide in the field of multiple myeloma, its precursors, its epidemiology, progression, and treatment. This has been the main thrust of his scientific and clinical efforts from the time he defended his thesis on monoclonal gammopathies at the Karolinska Institutet in 2009. In 2012 he became the youngest full professor at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Iceland and he is a consultant at Landspitali University Hospital. He designed and leads the largest myeloma screening study in the world, the iStopMM project in which over 80,000 individuals provided informed consent. His current research group includes 7 PhD-students, three postdocs, a lab with 4 biologists, 6 research nurses, three statisticians/data manager, and five support staff. He is an author of more than 110 scientific papers including the current guidelines for myeloma treatment and follow up and has an h-index of 57.

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

Project Title

Early Detection and Intervention in Smoldering Multiple Myeloma: population-based screening and treatment; Edit-SMM

Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center

I am a pediatric oncologist and associate professor in the division of bone marrow transplantation at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. I have a clinical and research interest in graft versus host disease because this is the most significant, devastating and life-impacting complication after a bone marrow transplant. I led the study in children of high dose oral vitamin A and showed that when given before starting chemotherapy, vitamin A reduces acute gastrointestinal and chronic graft versus host disease. I am now collaborating with 3 adult BMT programs to try and validate my findings in adult BMT patients as adults tend to have more chronic GVHD than children and I would like to extend this easy and effective strategy to patients of all ages across the US and worldwide.

Program Name(s)

Academic Clinical Trials Program (ACT)

Project Title

A randomized clinical trial of oral vitamin A to reduce chronic graft versus host disease in BMT

Weill Cornell Medicine

I completed my Ph.D. in pharmacology at Zhejiang University, China, in June 2020, specializing in cancer immunology. My doctoral research provided in-depth training in mouse models, particularly the construction of humanized immune recombinants such as PBMC and CD34-engrafted xenografts for pharmacodynamic studies. I developed skills in in vitro drug screening, immune cell sorting, and animal models, solidifying my expertise in experimental design. Currently, I am conducting research in Dr. Wendy Béguelin's lab, focusing on the role of the tumor microenvironment in B lymphoma progression. I pioneered a multiphoton microscopy approach for real-time imaging of cellular interactions within lymphoid tissues, enabling a detailed view of cellular interactions in lymphoma. Supported by experts from the Béguelin, Chris Xu and Melnick groups, our team leverages advanced murine lymphoma models and deep-tissue imaging techniques.

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

Dr. Chen is a Clinical Investigator and Attending Physician in the Adult Leukemia Program at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He attended Stanford University School of Medicine and completed Internal Medicine residency at Massachusetts General Hospital and Medical Oncology fellowship at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. His research interest is in the development of novel therapies for advanced myeloid neoplasms such as acute leukemias and myelodysplastic syndromes, with particular focuses on cell therapies and epigenetic approaches. 

Program Name(s)

Translational Research Program

Project Title

Memory-like natural killer cells and venetoclax to eradicate measurable residual disease in AML

TAP Partner

Vittoria Biotherapeutics is developing novel CAR-T cell therapies that transcend the limitations of current cell therapies. Based on technology exclusively licensed from the University of Pennsylvania, Vittoria's proprietary Senza5 platform unlocks the antitumor potential of engineered T cells and utilizes a five-day manufacturing process to maximize stemness, durability, and target cell cytotoxicity. By acting on the fundamental biology of T cells, Senza5 can be used to improve the efficacy of engineered T cell therapies with pipeline applications in oncology and autoimmune diseases.

Program Name(s)

Therapy Acceleration Program

Project Title

A phase 1 study of VIPER-101, a CD5-edited dual population chimeric antigen receptor cell therapy, to enhance immunotherapy against T-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma

Massachusetts General Hospital

Dr. Graubert is Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Hematologic Malignancy Program at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Cancer Center where he holds the Jon and JoAnn Hagler Chair in Oncology. Dr. Graubert is a physician-scientist with a laboratory-based research focus on the genetics of myeloid malignancies, including acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS). His group has used new technologies to identify genetic alterations in patients with MDS and AML, then created animal models to study their mechanism of action and susceptibility to novel therapies. In addition to his research, Dr. Graubert oversees faculty recruitment and development for the Hematologic Malignancy Program and provides clinical care in the Center for Leukemia. He co-leads the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Consortium Leukemia Program, is an Associate Member of the Broad Institute, and serves on scientific review panels for The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, the American Society of Hematology, the National Institutes of Health, and Genome Canada.

Program Name(s)

Specialized Center of Research Program

Project Title

Exploiting Vulnerabilities in RNA Splicing to Treat Hematologic Malignancies

Moffitt Cancer Center

Dr. Fabiana Perna is a physician-scientist who holds a full-time faculty position as Medical Director of the Cell Therapy Facility and Senior Member in the Dept. of BMT and Cellular Immunotherapy at Moffitt.

She completed clinical training as hematologist in Italy and acquired extensive research training at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York from 2008 to 2019. She is licensed in Florida and Indiana and serves as an attending physician.

She has published >70 papers on high-impact scientific journals and competed for many awards such as the American Italian Cancer Foundation fellowship, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center clinical fellowship, Translational Research Training in Hematology, ASH Scholar, MSKCC Technology Development Fund, Leukemia Research Foundation. She is the PI of two NIH/NCI grants including a R37 MERIT award.

Her work aims to develop novel CAR T cells for AML (Perna et al., Cancer Cell 2017) and Multiple Myeloma (Di Meo et al., Cancer Cell 2026).

Program Name(s)

Translational Research Program

Project Title

Alternatively spliced cell surface proteins for CAR T cell therapy of Acute Myeloid Leukemia

Moffitt Cancer Center

Eric Padron, MD is an Associate Member and Scientific Director of the Department of Hematology at Moffitt Cancer Center (MCC). He completed a hematology oncology fellowship and was recruited to MCC in 2013. Dr. Padron’s research focus has centered on studying clonal hematopoiesis (CH) and chronic myeloid neoplasms across the translational research spectrum. Importantly, he has published seminal work establishing key biologic features, novel treatments, and clinical trials in CMML. Further, Dr. Padron is an R37 MERIT awardee from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) for his work in chronic myelomonocytic leukemia and has published more than 175 peer reviewed articles describing advances in myeloid malignancies and hematologic conditions, including CH. Dr. Padron is among the few physician-scientists with experience both in leading multi-institution trials and a successful NCI funded laboratory making him uniquely suited to lead this proposal.

Program Name(s)

CMML Initiative

Project Title

Advancing the therapeutic landscape for Chronic Myelomonocytic Leukemia (CMML)

University of Perugia. Department of Medicine and Surgery

Dr. Enrico Tiacci is a physician scientist who established an independent translational and clinical research program in leukemias and lymphomas at the University and Hospital of Perugia, where he is Associate Professor of Hematology. His most relevant scientific contributions to pathogenesis, diagnosis and therapy of blood cancers span Hodgkin lymphoma, acute myeloid leukemia and, within the field of HCL, include the discovery of BRAF mutation as the genetic cause of this disease, its diagnostic exploitation and its therapeutic targeting in the clinic, which radically changed the understanding of HCL and considerably improved its treatment. For his achievements (mostly published in the highly influential New England Journal of Medicine), Dr. Tiacci received several prestigious national and international prizes as well as scientific grants from the most competitive international research agencies, including the European Research Council and Blood Cancer United.

Program Name(s)

Hairy Cell Leukemia Research Initiative

Project Title

BRAF inhibition as an alternative to chemotherapy in the treatment strategy of hairy cell leukemia

BRAF and BCL2 coinhibition with vemurafenib and venetoclax as a rational, short, all-oral targeted therapy for relapsed/refractory hairy cell leukemia

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

Dr. Odejide is a health services researcher, a hematologic oncologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Her research aims to improve outcomes and care delivery for patients with blood cancers throughout their disease trajectory. A substantial proportion of her work has focused on improving end-of-life (EOL) care for this patient population. For example, her work demonstrated that EOL quality measures developed for patients with solid malignancies are also applicable for patients with blood cancers (JCO, 2016). She also has extensive experience using insurance claims-based data (Medicare and Private) to identify potential solutions to improve EOL care. Dr. Odejide is interested in translating her work to impact policy. For example, she synthesized findings from her research and that of others to propose potential policy solutions to reduce barriers to high-quality EOL care for patients with blood cancers (JAMA, 2016). Her research was also part of the body of work used to support the American Society of Hematology 2019 policy statement to address barriers to high-quality hospice services for patients with blood cancers.

Program Name(s)

Equity in Access

Project Title

Health Insurance and End-of-Life Care for People with Hematologic Malignancies

Beckman Research Institute of the City of Hope

I am a genetic epidemiologist and Associate Professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the City of Hope National Medical Center. During my PhD, my research was focused on genetic variation and its role in human disease, and I received training in genetic epidemiology. Keen to pursue a career in childhood cancer research, I obtained a postdoctoral position at UCSF studying the etiology of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), the most common childhood cancer. I held a faculty position at the University of Southern California from 2018-2025 before joining City of Hope, where I lead epidemiology studies of ALL in high-risk populations, including Hispanic/Latinos and children with Down syndrome, and investigations into the early-life origins of childhood leukemia. My research has led to several novel discoveries, identifying new risk factors for ALL and shedding light on how Down syndrome increases leukemia risk. Understanding the causes of childhood ALL is my life’s work, with the hope that our discoveries will help to develop precision prevention strategies.

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

Project Title

Leveraging Susceptible Populations and Unique Resources in a Pathway to Prevention of Childhood Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia