Research We Fund

City of Hope (COH) has embarked on a strategic initiative to optimize our clinical network and increase research capacity at our Community and Affiliate Network (CAN) sites in Southern California. I would like to spearhead this endeavor for the Hematology program at our new Irvine campus in Orange county, which is set to open in August 2022. We are employing a hub-and-spokes model, in which the Duarte main campus is the main research center, with 3-5 multi-disciplinary CAN sites ultimately designated as research hubs. These CAN sites (hubs) will serve geographically proximal practice sites (spokes), which will refer patients for treatment on clinical trials at either the CAN site itself or at the main Duarte campus. Following a 6-month pilot for optimizing staffing, investigational pharmacy setup, specimen and data collection in Irvine, an additional CAN site will be initiated each year over a 5-year period to allow a wider area of Southern California residents to have access to high quality and impactful clinical trials in Hematology. Our ultimate goal is to accrue 20-50 patients per year from the community, depending on the number of sites activated each year.

Most patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) are not cured with chemotherapy alone, and most long-term survivors of AML have undergone an allogeneic stem cell transplant (also known as bone marrow transplant). The outlook is quite grim for patients whose AML relapses after transplant. We have developed a new type of treatment for AML called chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells for these patients. The goal of this project is to investigate how to improve CAR T cells for AML.

Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is a devastating blood cancer. Most AML patients will initially respond to standard therapy; however, for many patients the disease recurs resulting in patient death. Consequently, there is an urgent need to develop new therapeutic strategies for relapsed AML patients. The objective of our proposal is to understand and target properties specific to relapsed AML cells with the overall goal of improving relapsed AML patient outcomes.

We identified that KDM5 can regulate important transcription factors in multiple myeloma (MM) and regulate the bone marrow (BM) microenvironment in providing protection toward MM, which also reduces anti-MM immunity. Thus, our study will utilize our novel potent and selective KDM5 inhibitor to fully dissect the interactions between MM cells, the BM microenvironment and the immune system in cellular and animal models to establish important mechanistic insights into MM.