Who We Fund

Massachusetts General Hospital

Dr. El-Jawahri graduated from Harvard Medical School and completed her residency training at Massachusetts General Hospital. She subsequently completed her hematology-oncology fellowship at the Dana Farber Harvard Cancer Center Fellowship Program. Dr. El-Jawahri is an oncologist specializing in the care of patients with blood cancers and those undergoing bone marrow transplants. Her goal is to improve the quality of life and care for patients with blood cancers and their families. Her research interests include developing novel supportive care and digital interventions to facilitate patient-centered decision-making, and improve the care of patients with blood cancers and their families. She serves as the Director of the Blood and Marrow Transplant Survivorship Program, the Associate Director of the Cancer Outcomes Research and Education Program (CORE), and the Director of Digital Health at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

Project Title

Randomized Trial of a Sexual Dysfunction Intervention for Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplant Survivors

H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute

Frederick L. Locke, MD is a medical oncologist and translational investigator dedicated to discovering and implementing ways to use the immune system against lymphoid malignancies. He is the Co-Leader of the Immuno-Oncology Program at Moffitt Cancer Center, where he also serves as Vice-Chair and an Associate member in the Department of Blood and Marrow Transplant and Cellular Immunotherapy. Dr. Locke oversaw the creation, and leads, Moffitt’s Immune Cell Therapy (ICE-T) program. This cross departmental effort provides specialized care of high-risk immunotherapy and cellular therapy patients, regardless of tumor type. Dr. Locke is a first or senior author on numerous high impact publications, including articles in the New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet Oncology, Journal of Clinical Oncology, JAMA Oncology, and Blood.

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

Project Title

Clinical investigation to improve efficacy of CAR-T Cell Therapy for Large B Cell Lymphoma

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

Project Title

Mechanisms of oncogenic transcription in NPM1-mutant myeloid leukemia

Albert Einstein College of Medicine

I am a Postdoctoral Fellow under the supervision of Dr. Ulrich Steidl at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, NY and currently studying the role of H2.0 homeobox-like protein, called Hlx in short, in the development and maintenance of acute myeloid leukemia (AML). Hlx is overexpressed in 80% of AML patients at transcript level. However, we lack the understanding of this protein’s function at molecular level.

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

Project Title

Role of HLX in leukemia induction and maintenance

Yale

Dr. Manyi Wei gained his B.S. degree at China Pharmaceutical University in Nanjing. Subsequently, he completed his Ph.D. training in Cell Biology at the Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. During his Ph.D. research, Dr. Wei focused on the regulatory role of long non-coding RNA in gene expression and its impact on neuronal function. Dr. Wei has always nurtured a particular interest in understanding and developing novel treatment for leukemia. After his Ph.D. training, Dr. Wei joined the laboratory of Dr. Stephanie Halene at Yale Cancer Center and Yale University School of Medicine. He immediately began exciting work on RNA modifications and their functions in the initiation and progression of acute myeloid leukemia and myelodysplastic syndromes and importantly on novel therapeutic approaches exploiting cell intrinsic and extrinsic effects of targeted inhibitors of RNA methylation. His goal is to contribute to the cure of leukemia.

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

Project Title

Harnessing METTL3 inhibition in acute megakaryoblastic leukemia driven by the t(1;22) fusion involving a member of the m6A writer complex

Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania

Dr. Garfall is a hematologist-oncologist specializing in the care of multiple myeloma patients and research on new multiple myeloma therapies. He is a member of the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is an Assistant Professor of Medicine. Dr. Garfall completed his undergraduate studies at Princeton University, medical school at New York University, residency in internal medicine at Brigham & Women’s Hospital, and hematology/oncology fellowship at Penn. Dr. Garfall’s research focuses on immunotherapy. He has conducted clinical trials with CAR T cells and bispecific antibodies for multiple myeloma. He is specifically interested on developing new approaches to prevent relapse in multiple myeloma patients.

Program Name(s)

Academic Clinical Trials Program (ACT)

Translational Research Program

Project Title

Limited-duration bispecific antibody therapy for multiple myeloma

Anti-Sox2 immunotherapy to prevent multiple myeloma relapse

The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center

Dr. Chengcheng “Alec” Zhang, Morton H. Sanger Professorship in Oncology and Michael L. Rosenberg Scholar for Biomedical Research at UT Southwestern, earned his B.S. from University of Science and Technology of China and Ph.D. from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. After postdoctoral training at Harvey Lodish’s lab of Whitehead Institute, he established his lab at UT Southwestern in 2007. He is studying the signaling and function of immune surface molecules (including leukocyte immunoglobulin-like receptor family B, or LILRBs) in hematopoietic cells and developing novel therapies for treatment of hematologic malignancies and other cancers. He published >109 peer-reviewed articles, and was a recipient of several awards, including American Society of Hematology Junior Faculty Scholar Award and Leukemia & Lymphoma Society Scholar Award. Two anti-LILRB blocking antibodies developed by the team are in phase 1 clinical trials for treatment of myeloid leukemia and solid cancers.

Program Name(s)

Translational Research Program

Project Title

Development of LILRB1-based immunotherapy for multiple myeloma treatment

Washington University in St. Louis

I began my career at The Ohio State University, where I studied blood vessel development and received my PhD in the lab of Dr. Brenda Lilly. After graduating, I was interested in moving into the cancer field, so I joined the lab of Dr. Jill de Jong at University of Chicago, working on T-cell leukemia in the zebrafish model. There I adapted a method for identifying leukemia stem cells within a tumor, the cells responsible for relapse and resistance after initial treatment. I then moved to the neighboring lab of Dr. Megan McNerney to comprehensively test genes within a frequently deleted portion of the genome that correlates with multiple blood disorders and leukemias. Next, I followed my wife’s fellowship appointment to Washington University in St. Louis and joined the lab of Dr. Daniel Link. Now in my second year here, I am continuing my work in the leukemia field, focusing on TP53, the most commonly mutated gene in all cancers. Mutations in TP53 mark the worst forms of leukemia, resistant to most chemotherapies, and finding an effective treatment is the focus of this proposal.

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

Project Title

Combined targeting of ATR and replicative stress in TP53-mutated AML

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

Project Title

RECONNECT: Overcoming Racial and Ethnic Inequity in Clinical Trial Enrollment via Clinical Trial Nurse Navigation and Provider Communication Training​

The University of Texas at Austin

William Matsui is a Professor of Oncology, Director of the Hematologic Malignancy Program, Associate Chair of Research, and the Deputy Director of the LiveSTRONG Cancer Institutes at the Dell Medical School and the University of Texas at Austin. He also serves as the interim Vice Dean of Research for Dell Med. Dr. Matsui's research has focused on understanding the intersection between cancer, stem cell, and developmental biology. His laboratory first identified unique populations of cancer cells with stem cell properties in multiple myeloma and found that several pathways regulating normal stem cells, including those involved in embryonic development, are abnormally activated in cancer stem cells. Importantly, these basic research studies have simultaneously been translationally relevant and served as the basis for over a dozen novel clinical trials.

Program Name(s)

Translational Research Program

Project Title

Stem cell features and Notch signaling in p53 deleted multiple myeloma

Albert Einstein College of Medicine

Dr. Keisuke Ito is an Associate Professor of Cell Biology and Medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where he has also served as the Director of Scientific Resources at the Stem Cell Institute. After his postdoctoral training, first at Keio University, where he also completed his clinical training, and then at Harvard, he joined the Einstein faculty in 2012. Dr. Ito’s team has focused on advancing our understanding of the regulatory pathways controlling the equilibrium of stem cells. At the core of his work is the process of stem cell division, and the balance between self-renewal and differentiation, which directly impacts tissue homeostasis and the development of hematological malignancies. Dr. Ito is devoted to targeting mitophagy, a mitochondrial quality-control process, as a therapeutic strategy, and has cut a path along the leading edge of research into the role of Ten-eleven translocation in the pathogenesis of myelodysplastic syndrome.

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

Project Title

Targeting mitophagy of leukemia stem cells for therapy

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center

Dr. Michael G. Kharas is a Member of the Molecular Pharmacology Program at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (New York, NY, USA) and member of Center for Hematological Malignancies. Dr. Kharas finished his postdoctoral training at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and studied how signaling pathways alters stem cell regulation with Drs. Gary Gilliland and George Daley. In 2011 he started his laboratory at MSK and focused on the controllers of cellular fate in the blood. His laboratory has uncovered new RNA regulators and how they modulate self-renewal, cell-fate decisions, and differentiation in both normal blood development and in myeloid leukemia. Dr. Kharas has received recognition including the Leukemia Lymphoma Society Scholar Award and American Society of Hematology Scholar Award. His laboratory is developing inhibitors that block the function of RNA regulators as a new therapeutic strategy in leukemia.

Program Name(s)

Discovery

Project Title

Discovering the function and targeting dysregulated nuclear condensates in myeloid leukemia