Constellation Pharmaceuticals
myeloproliferative neoplasms
Constellation Pharmaceuticals
Cambridge, MA
United States
TAP Partner
Constellation Pharmaceuticals was a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company developing novel therapeutics that selectively modulate gene expression to address serious unmet medical needs in patients with cancer. MorphoSys acquired Constellation in 2021 and then Novartis acquired MorphoSys in 2024. Novartis continues to develop pelabresib in patients with myeloproliferative neoplasms.
Program Name(s)
Therapy Acceleration Program
Project Title
Dimericon
Blood cancers
Dimericon, LLC
Zurich,
Switzerland
TAP Partner
Dimericon is a private biotech company focused on exploring crosslinked helix dimers (Dimericons) as therapeutics and templates for small molecule development. Dimericon’s technology targets hard-to-drug intracellular protein-protein interactions using rationally designed mimetics of helix dimers. The Seed round of financing will support preclinical studies to further develop the current cFLIP inhibitor lead compound, DMRX1004, to be an IND ready clinical candidate in hematological malignancies.
Program Name(s)
Therapy Acceleration Program
Project Title
Supporting development of dimericons (crosslinked helix dimers) for blood cancers
Francesco Forconi, MD, PhD, DM, FRCPath
Southampton,
United Kingdom
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
Matteo Bellone
Smoldering multiple myeloma
Matteo Bellone, MD
Lombardia,
Italy
Fondazione Centro San Raffaele
Dr. Matteo Bellone obtained an M.D. degree (with honors) and was Board Certified in Allergology and Clinical Immunology at the Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy. He had a 3-year post-doctoral training at the University of Minnesota working on autoimmunity with Bianca Conti-Fine. Since the early nineties he has been investigating interactions between cancer and immune cells with discoveries leading to several clinical outputs. He is Head of the Cellular Immunology Unit at Ospedale San Raffaele (Milan, Italy), where he also practices as Clinical Immunologist. He is adjunct professor of Immunology at Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele, Milan, Associate Editor at Frontiers in Immunology and Frontiers in Oncology, and member of several boards serving scientific journals and charities. He is Secretary and Treasurer of the Network Italiano per la BioTerapia dei Tumori (NIBIT), Council Member of the European Network for Cancer Immunotherapy (ENCI), and member of the SIICA, and the AACR.
Program Name(s)
Translational Research Program
Gut microbiota modulation to prevent progression of smoldering multiple myeloma to active disease
Lucy Godley
preleukemia
Lucy Godley, MD, PhD
Evanston, IL
United States
Northwestern University
I began my scientific career in the Marchesi laboratories (Yale, 1982-1985) and then as an undergraduate under Don Wiley (Harvard, 1986-1988). I entered the Medical Scientist Training Program (1988-1995) at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), performing doctoral research with Harold Varmus, at UCSF and the NIH. I defended my thesis at UCSF and completed medical training at Northwestern (1996-1997). I was an Internal Medicine house officer and Hematology/Oncology fellow at Univ of Chicago (UofC, 1997-2003)then stayed on as a UofC faculty member as a physician-scientist, with both research and clinical responsibilities (2003-2023).
Effective April 1, 2023, I have joined the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University as the inaugural director of the Jeff and Marianne Silver Family Blood Cancer Institute of the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center. I will also serve as Clinical Director of Cancer Genetics.
I derive synergy between bench research and the bedside to understand disease on a molecular level. This proposal seeks to understand how inherited DNA changes influence the development of bone marrow cancers, with the goal of developing interventions that would prevent cancers in at-risk individuals to make my job as an oncologist obsolete.
Program Name(s)
Discovery
Project Title
CHEK2 as a predisposition gene for clonal hematopoiesis and hematopoietic malignancies
Michael Keller
COVID-19, immunotherapy
Michael Keller, MD
Washington, DC
United States
Children's Research Institute
Michael Keller, M.D., is a pediatric immunologist at Children's National Hospital and specializes in the diagnosis and treatment of primary and secondary immunodeficiency disorders. He has authored many peer-reviewed articles and contributed to expert consensus guidelines on the treatment and diagnosis of primary immunodeficiency disorders. Dr. Keller is a member of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology (AAAAI); the Clinical Immunology Society; the European Society of Immunodeficiency; and the Primary Immunodeficiency Treatment Consortium (PIDTC). Dr. Keller's research focuses on the use of adoptive T-cell therapies for treatment of infections in immunocompromised patients, including the use of this therapy to improve outcomes in children with primary immunodeficiency disorders as well as those undergoing bone marrow transplantation for cancer.
He is the primary investigator of several Phase I-II studies of virus-specific T-cell immunotherapy. Dr. Keller lives in Maryland with his wife and two sons; and enjoys travel, hiking, and martial arts.
Program Name(s)
Translational Research Program
Project Title
T-cell immunotherapy for prevention of COVID-19 following bone marrow transplantation
Venkata Lokesh Battula
immunotherapy and AML
Venkata Lokesh Battula, PhD
Richmond, VA
United States
Virginia Commonwealth University
Venkata Battula, Ph.D., serves as Assistant Director of Massey Comprehensive Cancer Center’s Cancer Research Training and Education Coordination (CRTEC) program and is a Professor in the Department of Internal Medicine at the VCU School of Medicine. He joined VCU Massey from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, where he was an Associate Professor in the Departments of Leukemia and Breast Medical Oncology within the Division of Cancer Medicine. He earned his Ph.D. in Human Cell Biology from Justus Liebig University in Giessen, Germany, and brings extensive expertise in translational cancer research.
Dr. Battula’s research focuses on understanding how cancer cells develop resistance to chemotherapy, radiation, and targeted therapies; identifying novel drug resistance mechanisms; and developing new combination therapies. His work has been instrumental in identifying GD2 as a novel marker in patients with triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), an aggressive subtype with limited treatment options. GD2, expressed on cancer stem cells, is associated with tumor growth and poor clinical outcomes. Building on these findings, Dr. Battula recently secured funding from the U.S. Department of Defense to initiate a clinical trial targeting GD2 in TNBC.
In his role within CRTEC, Dr. Battula is committed to expanding graduate-level training opportunities and advancing programs that prepare the next generation of cancer researchers.
Program Name(s)
Translational Research Program
Project Title
Fahmin Basher
transplant and GvHD
Fahmin Basher, MD, PhD
Durham, NC
United States
Duke University Medical Center
Fahmin Basher, MD, PhD completed her bachelor’s degrees in chemical engineering and biological sciences at the University of South Carolina. She then went on to pursue a combined MD/PhD in cancer immunology at the Medical University of South Carolina in the Medical Scientist Training Program under the mentorship of Jennifer Wu, PhD. She completed her internal medicine residency training at the University of Miami prior to transitioning to Duke University for her hematology/medical oncology fellowship training. During her fellowship, she served as chief fellow and was supported by the Duke Hematology and Transfusion Medicine T32 training grant. Her clinical and research interests include a focus in translational immunology, particularly the treatment of hematologic malignancies and optimization of therapeutic approaches and complications after stem cell transplantation and cellular therapy. She is currently being mentored by Stefanie Sarantopoulos, MD, PhD.
Program Name(s)
Career Development Program
Project Title
The Role of the DNA Sensor AIM2 in B Cell Fate and Function After HCT
Sigurður Kristinsson
Smoldering myeloma
Sigurður Kristinsson, MD PhD
Reykjavík,
Iceland
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
Sarah Tasian
pediatric leukemias
Sarah Tasian, MD
Philadelphia, PA
United States
The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
Sarah K Tasian, MD PhD is a pediatric oncologist and physician-scientist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine who is interested in development of molecularly-targeted therapeutics and immunotherapies for children with high-risk leukemias. She specialises in the clinical care of children with leukemia and lymphoma, is an internationally-recognized expert in pediatric ALL and AML biology and novel therapeutics, and serves as Chief of the Hematologic Malignancies Program at CHOP, where she holds the Joshua Kahan Endowed Chair in Pediatric Leukemia Research. Her federally-funded translational laboratory research program focuses upon preclinical and early-phase clinical testing of small molecule inhibitors and chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell immunotherapies in high-risk genetic subsets of childhood ALL, AML, and JMML. As an experienced clinical trialist, Dr Tasian also has several leadership roles in the Children’s Oncology Group ALL and Myeloid Diseases executive committees and is the clinical trials leader of the international Blood Cancer United PedAL consortium, working collaboratively with colleagues across the world to advance precision medicine therapeutics for children with relapsed/refractory leukemias.
Program Name(s)
Career Development Program
Project Title
Precision Medicine Inhibitor and Immunotherapy Approaches for High-Risk Childhood Leukemias
Andrew Hantel
Equity in Access
Andrew Hantel, MD
Boston, MA
United States
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
Dr. Hantel is a faculty member in the Divisions of Population Sciences and Leukemia at DFCI and an Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School. His research focuses on characterizing and remediating clinical trial enrollment disparities for patients with blood cancers, for which he has been awarded career development awards from the NCI (K08) and ASCO to develop and test related multilevel interventions. He also leads multicenter care delivery trials assessing social determinants of health and the impact of Duffy null phenotype on trial participation and outcomes. Work related to these projects has led to multiple publications in journals such as in JAMA, JCO, JNCI, and NEJM. He co-chairs the working group of the DFCI Clinical Trial Access Committee and serves as the Health Disparities and Leukemia Committee Liaison for the Alliance cooperative group. In his clinical role, he cares for patients with leukemia and related hematologic malignancies.
Program Name(s)
Equity in Access
Project Title
The Collaboration and Infrastructure Program for Diversifying Blood Cancer Clinical Trials
Shazia Nakhoda
Equity in Access
Shazia Nakhoda, MD
Philadelphia, PA
United States
Fox Chase Cancer Center
Dr. Nakhoda is a clinician-scientist in the department of hematology/oncology at Fox Chase Cancer Center. She serves as steering committee member for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society supported Philadelphia Lymphoma rounds and is a panelist on the NCCN Guidelines for Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia. She has a research focus on improving tolerability of lymphoma and leukemia directed therapies in elderly patients and those with medical comorbidities, actively running an investigator-initiated study evaluating methods to improve methotrexate toxicity in this population. She is well suited to serve as primary investigator for this proposed project having served as local site PI for several multi-institutional investigational studies in lymphoma and with now 6 years of malignant hematology experience serving the Philadelphia area, first as hematology/oncology fellow at Temple University Hospital System and FCCC and now as an assistant professor at Fox Chase.
Program Name(s)
Equity in Access