Who We Fund

Albert Einstein College of Medicine

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

Project Title

Glycotyping as a novel approach to study leukemia stem cell heterogeneity and function

Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania

Dr. Marco Ruella is a physician-scientist and assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He treats patients with blood cancers and focuses on using immunotherapy, where the body’s own immune system is harnessed to fight cancer. His research looks at why some cancers return after CAR T-cell therapy and aims to design new treatments to prevent this. Dr. Ruella earned his medical degree in Italy and completed advanced training in the U.S. He has received many awards for his work, including from the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. Dr. Ruella has published widely, holds multiple patents, and advises companies in cancer immunotherapy. He also founded viTToria Biotherapeutics to help bring new treatments to patients.

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

Translational Research Program

Project Title

Building Upon The Success Of CART19: Safe and Effective Next-Generation CART For Relapsed And Refractory Lymphomas

β-Hydroxybutyrate To Enhance CAR T Cell Immunotherapy Against Hematological Cancers

Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

My name is Ivan Odak and I am a postdoctoral researcher in the Brody lab. I am an accomplished researcher with 20 authored papers, 9 of which as first or last author. I obtained my PhD summa cum laude from Hannover Biomedical Research School in Germany, where I also worked as a postdoc in the lab of Reinhold Förster. Though challenging, I find science primarily enjoyable, and I like using my skills to tackle important questions in the field of immuno-therapy. The colleagues see me as tireless force in the workplace and I often use my positive attitude and energy to motivate others. My ultimate goal is to establish my own lab dedicated to research and discovery of cancer immunotherapies.

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

Project Title

Prevention of antigen escape by modulation of off-target tumor killing in T cells

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center

I am a Research Scholar in the laboratory of Dr. Omar Abdel-Wahab at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. I obtained my Bachelor’s degree at East China University of Science and Technology and completed my PhD training at the Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health in the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences under the mentorship of Dr. Lan Wang. During my graduate studies, I identified an important role of the histone methyltransferase SETD2 in the transformation of patients with myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) to acute myeloid leukemia (AML). As an LLS Special Fellow, I will focus on developing novel CAR-T cell therapy targeting cell surface expression of the RNA helicase U5 snRNP200. Moreover, I will explore the mechanistic basis for cell surface localization of U5 snRNP200 on AML cells. I hope that my work has immediate therapeutic potential for the future treatment of AML while shedding important novel insights into the pathobiology of AML.

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

University of California, San Francisco

Program Name(s)

Translational Research Program

Project Title

Towards Risk-Adapted Therapeutic Strategies in CNS Lymphoma

Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center

I am an Associate Professor of Medicine (Hematology, Oncology, and Transplantation) at Fred Hutch with clinical trial and computational expertise. I have a broad background with a Master of Science in Clinical Investigation combined with computational sciences training, including a PhD in evolutionary models of aging and a KL2 career development award focused on microbiome bioinformatics. I leverage my clinical and computational expertise to make cancer treatment safer by improving supportive care. I characterize microbiota disruptions in patients with cancer, investigate their clinical significance, and test microbiota restorative therapeutics to improve clinical outcomes. Recently, I led the largest clinical trial of FMT in allogeneic stem cell transplant recipients to date. We used findings from this trial to design the proposed randomized placebo-controlled phase 2 trial of third-party FMT to prevent aGVHD after transplantation.

Program Name(s)

Academic Clinical Trials Program (ACT)

Project Title

Fecal microbiota transplantation to prevent acute GVHD after allogeneic stem cell transplantation

Ospedale Pediatrico Bambino Gesù

Dr. Del Bufalo is a physician-scientist with interest in childhood malignancies, tumor immunology, immunotherapy and hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. She participated in the preclinical and clinical development of the academic clinical trials with CAR-T cells at OPBG. In particular, she coordinated 2 studies on different CD9-CAR T cell platforms for the treatment of children with relapsed/refractory (r/r) BCP-ALL and the phase I/II study to test GD2-CART01 in children with r/r neuroblastoma. She is the PI of a research project to test donor-derived CAR T cells for the treatment of children/young adults with BCP-ALL. She managed the activation and conduction of the phase I clinical trial on CD7-CART.PEBL for the treatment of children/young adults with r/r T-ALL (PI Prof. Franco Locatelli). She is the new chair of the European iBFM Resistant Disease Committee and President of the Young Investigators Section of the scientific technical committee of the Italian Ministry of Health.

Program Name(s)

Academic Clinical Trials Program (ACT)

Project Title

CD7-CAR T cells with PEBL for treatment of children/young adults with relapsed/refractory T-ALL

Columbia University Medical Center

Viviana obtained her BS in Biological Sciences and her master degree in Genetics and Molecular Biology at Sapienza, University of Rome before moving to Paris, France, to join Dr Di Nunzio laboratory at Institut Pasteur, for her PhD studies. Viviana applied fluorescence microscopy techniques to track HIV-1 in the host nucleus and investigate about the viral interplay with factors in the nucleus of the infected cells during early steps of replication. Guided by her interest in epigenetics, Viviana joined the Viny Lab in 2023 for her postdoctoral training where she aims to identify gene regulation mechanisms linked to blood cell development and disease. Viviana’s goal is to contribute to innovative blood research for more effective personalized treatments and positively impact the academic environment. She also hopes to inspire younger generation to get involved in science and be able to mentor students in their career path in cancer research.

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

Project Title

Impaired dynamic nucleosome remodeling as a leukemogenic mechanism and therapeutic target in AML

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

Eric Smith, MD PhD is Director of Translational Research for Immune Effector Cell Therapies at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) where his primary responsibility is as PI of a gene and cell engineering pre-clinical laboratory. He is an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School (Immunology PhD Faculty); Associate Member at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT; a Member at the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy; and the founding faculty director of the IMmunotherapy Platform for Antibody and CAR Therapeutics Development and Translation (IMPACT2) Center at DFCI. He received his MD/PhD and internal medicine training at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and medical oncology and post-doctoral training at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and stayed on as faculty in the Cellular Engineering Center and Myeloma/Cellular Therapy services. He was recruited to DFCI in 2020 to advance the home-grown adoptive cellular therapy pipeline there. The Smith Lab for Genetic and Cellular Engineering focuses on pre-clinical efforts to advance the field and developing therapies for both hematologic and solid tumors for the benefit of patients. More than a dozen clinical trials have been initiated stemming from his team’s lab work. The most developed of which is a first-in-class CAR targeting GPRC5D, a target he described as important for the immunotherapy of myeloma; he and his colleagues reported the phase I study in NEJM, and a phase II multi-center registration study is now ongoing.

Program Name(s)

Discovery

Project Title

Interrogating T-cell apoptotic priming to improve CAR-T persistence in treatment of lymphoid malignancies

Columbia University Medical Center

Dr. Doulatov is an Associate Professor at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. His laboratory investigates how normal hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) transform into blood cancers. As an undergraduate at UCLA with Dr. Jeff Miller, he discovered a new class of retroelements. As a Ph.D. student with Dr. John Dick at the University of Toronto, he helped establish the “roadmap” of the human HSC and progenitor hierarchy. As a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. George Daley at Harvard, he identified methods to promote HSC development from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). These advances have enabled the use of iPSCs as a platform for disease modeling and drug screens, leading to the discovery of a drug for inherited anemia. The Doulatov laboratory is using human iPSCs and HSCs to discover how oncogenic mutations cooperate to transform normal stem cells into leukemias. His long-term goal is to develop treatments that target malignant stem cells leading to lasting remissions for patients.

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

Project Title

Modeling and targeting leukemic transformation of human hematopoietic stem cells

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

Dr. Hormoz is an Assistant Professor with the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School and Department of Data Science at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He obtained his PhD in Applied Physics from Harvard University. His postdoctoral studies were conducted jointly as a theorist at the Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics (UCSB), and as an experimentalist at Caltech. Hormoz lab’s mission is to control biological systems to understand life and cure disease such as cancer. His lab develops new technologies for recording and measuring the molecular states of individual cells and computational frameworks for interpreting the large data sets that these measurements generate. Dr. Hormoz’s research on blood cancers has focused on reconstructing the history of cancer in individual patients to understand when cancer first occurs and how cancer cells expand in each patient.

Program Name(s)

Discovery

Project Title

Predicting progression in myeloproliferative neoplasm patients by reconstructing the history of disease in each patient

Children's Research Institute

Dr. Bollard received her medical degree at the University of Otago. She is board certified both in pediatrics and hematology. She is currently the Bosworth Chair for Cancer Biology, the Director of the Center for Cancer and Immunology Research, and the Director of the Program for Cell Enhancement and Technologies for Immunotherapy (CETI) at Children’s National Health System. She is a Professor of Pediatrics and of Microbiology, Immunology, and Tropical Medicine at The George Washington University and the Associate Center Director for Translational Research and Innovation at the GW Cancer Center. Dr. Bollard is a member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI) and is the current President of the Foundation for the Accreditation of Cellular Therapy (FACT). She is currently Editor in Chief of Blood Advances. She has over 200 peer reviewed publications. Her bench and translational research focuses on improving outcomes for patients after hematopoietic stem cell transplantation and on the development of novel cell therapies for cancer and virus-associated diseases.

Program Name(s)

Translational Research Program

T cells with native and chimeric receptors against multiple tumor targets for acute myeloid leukemia