Research We Fund

My ultimate goal is to develop more effective, better tolerated, and individualized treatment for patients with AML. This project focuses on AML patients with IDH1 or IDH2 mutations, with a clinical trial evaluating a combination of three agents which are effective in IDH-mutated AML. While these therapies are not curative on their own, my hope is that this combination will lead to a practice changing all-oral, outpatient, and well-tolerated curative strategy for patients with IDH-mutated AML.

Dr. Madhav Dhodapkar, M.D., of Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University, Atlanta, leads a multi-institutional, multi-disciplinary LLS Specialized Center of Research team focused on advancing new immunotherapies for patients with multiple myeloma. Their goal is to improve the effectiveness of CAR T-cell immunotherapy, which engineers the patient’s T cells to find and kill cancer cells. The CAR-T they are studying targets a protein called BCMA found on the surface of all myeloma cells. BCMA-targeting therapies are showing tremendous promise for treating myeloma patients in clinical trials, but many patients eventually relapse. Dr. Dhodapkar’s group is working to understand the mechanisms that cause some patients to be resistant to the treatment. They are also investigating another type of immunotherapy that relies on natural killer T cells. His team includes researchers at Emory as well as Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle.

Nearly half of patients with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL), ultimately fail current therapies and die from their disease. Selective targeting of cyclin-dependent kinase 9 (CDK9) is a promising strategy, as evidenced by potent anti-tumor effects in preclinical models of DLBCL. Yet tumors evade therapy by developing resistance. This proposal seeks to both elucidate and circumvent the oncogenic events underlying this resistance in order to offer novel therapeutic approaches to treat DLBCL.

Mantle cell lymphoma (MCL) is an aggressive blood cancer which affects about 3,000 individuals in the United States annually. Despite advances of novel therapies in blood cancers, MCL remains incurable, and patients ultimately succumb to disease. We seek to evaluate longitudinal samples from patients with MCL treated with novel therapies to understand the mechanisms of drug resistance. We identify novel targets, with a particular focus on protein turnover pathways, to overcome drug resistance and improve survival of patients with MCL.