Kirk Schultz
pediatric transplantation
Kirk Schultz, MD
Vancouver,
Canada
University of British Columbia
Dr. Kirk Schultz is a Professor at the University of British Columbia, BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute, and an elected fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences. Dr. Schultz is a Pediatric Hematologist/Oncologist focused on new therapies and rejection in Blood and Marrow Transplantation (BMT) and immune therapy of blood cancers. Dr. Schultz is a past recipient of the CIHR/Wyeth Clinical Research Chair in Transplantation, past chair of the Pediatric BMT Consortium the largest children’s BMT clinical trials group world-wide, and president-elect of Cell Therapy and Transplantation Canada (CTTC), the national group for Canadian cell therapy and BMT. Dr. Schultz was the co-chair of the 2020 NIH cGvHD Consensus meeting and past chair of the Biomarkers working group for the previous 2 Consensus meetings (2004 & 2014). Dr. Schultz was the Team leader for the pediatric Applied Biomarkers in Late Effects (ABLE) Team grant (2011 – 2016; $4.3M Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) funded). Dr. Schultz has 219 publications and 2 CIHR Grants and other smaller funding.
Program Name(s)
Translational Research Program
Project Title
A Polyomic Approach to Chronic Graft-versus-Host Disease (cGvHD) Biomarkers in Adults
Oreofe Odejide
Equity in Access
Oreofe Odejide, MD
Boston, MA
United States
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
Dr. Odejide is a health services researcher, a hematologic oncologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Her research aims to improve outcomes and care delivery for patients with blood cancers throughout their disease trajectory. A substantial proportion of her work has focused on improving end-of-life (EOL) care for this patient population. For example, her work demonstrated that EOL quality measures developed for patients with solid malignancies are also applicable for patients with blood cancers (JCO, 2016). She also has extensive experience using insurance claims-based data (Medicare and Private) to identify potential solutions to improve EOL care. Dr. Odejide is interested in translating her work to impact policy. For example, she synthesized findings from her research and that of others to propose potential policy solutions to reduce barriers to high-quality EOL care for patients with blood cancers (JAMA, 2016). Her research was also part of the body of work used to support the American Society of Hematology 2019 policy statement to address barriers to high-quality hospice services for patients with blood cancers.
Program Name(s)
Equity in Access
Project Title
Health Insurance and End-of-Life Care for People with Hematologic Malignancies
Koichi Takahashi
AML/MDS
Koichi Takahashi, MD
Houston, TX
United States
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
Koichi Takahashi, MD, PhD is Associate Professor in the Departments of Leukemia and Genomic Medicine at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. He received MD degree from Niigata University School of Medicine and PhD degree from Kyoto University School of Medicine, both in Japan. He then did internal medicine residency at Toranomon Hospital, Tokyo, Japan, and Beth Israel Medical Center in New York, followed by hematology and oncology fellowship at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. During the fellowship, he was trained in Dr. Andrew Futreal’s Lab for cancer genomics. He is board certified in Internal Medicine, Hematology, and Medical Oncology. Dr. Takahashi is well known for his research in delineating how selection of pre-existing clonal hematopoiesis under chemotherapy contributes to the development of therapy-related myeloid neoplasms. His laboratory uses state-of-the-art single-cell technologies to understand the mechanism of leukemia development and create strategies for early detection and prevention.
Program Name(s)
Career Development Program
Project Title
Understanding the clonal origin, evolution, and progression of myeloid malignancies
Enterome
vaccine, FL, MZL
Enterome
Paris,
France
TAP Partner
Enterome is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company developing breakthrough immunomodulatory drugs for the treatment of cancer and immune diseases. Enterome’s pioneering approach to drug discovery is based on its unique and powerful bacterial Mimicry drug discovery platform, allowing it to analyze and uncover new biological insights from the millions of gut bacterial proteins in constant cross-talk with the human body. Its first-in-class small protein and peptide drug candidates modulate the immune system by closely mimicking the structure, effect or actions of specific antigens, hormones, or cytokines.
Program Name(s)
Therapy Acceleration Program
Project Title
Alba Rodriguez-Meira, PhD
Boston, MA
United States
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
I was an endlessly curious child who wanted to become a scientist. But it was my own experience as a teenager in a Pediatric Hospital Unit that shaped my scientific passion, where I became friends with children affected by leukemia. I was shocked by the terrible implications of this disease and became determined to design new therapies to fight it.
Inspired by this experience, I studied cancer biology at top institutions across Europe and the US. I wanted to understand how leukemia originated, and how it evolved to become an aggressive and hard-to-treat disease.
As a PhD student at the University of Oxford, I developed new sequencing technologies to understand how leukemia arises and evolves inside each individual cell. My deep passion for leukemia research later brought me to Dana Farber Cancer Institute, where I am currently studying the earliest molecular changes that predispose to leukemia, aiming to prevent leukemia from developing in the first place.
Project Title
Rizwan Romee
Immunotherapy
Rizwan Romee, MD
Boston, MA
United States
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
Dr. Romee is a translational physician-scientist at Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School. His long-term research goals are to translate novel aspects of immunology to improve treatments for patients with advanced cancer. He did his medical training at University of Minnesota and Washington University and was a faculty at Washington University before joining Dana Farber. He is the PI of Romee Lab for NK Cell Gene Manipulation and Therapy (https://romeelab.dana-farber.org) and the focus of his lab is gene editing of the immune cells particularly NK cells to enhance their cancer cell targeting and killing. His work helped describe memory-like NK cells which have enhanced activity against cancer cells and persist for months after their infusion into leukemia patients. He is leading efforts at Dana Farber to develop novel protocols using memory-like NK cells with other immunomodulating agents like checkpoint inhibitors in patients with advanced and otherwise incurable leukemia and solid tumors like Head and Neck Cancer, Ovarian Cancer and Kidney Cancer.
Program Name(s)
Career Development Program
Translational Research Program
Project Title
Cytokine induced memory-like NK cell immunotherapy to target post transplant relapse
Leslie Crews, PhD
San Diego, CA
United States
University of California, San Diego
Dr. Leslie Crews is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at UCSD with a passion for stem cell biology and translational cancer research. She received her bachelor’s degree from UCLA and a PhD in Molecular Pathology from UCSD. During her postdoctoral training in leukemia and myeloma research, Dr. Crews and her collaborators discovered that the interferon-responsive RNA editing gene ADAR1 is hyper-activated in myeloma and that this molecule promotes disease progression and drug resistance by activating stem cell regulatory pathways. Since starting her independent laboratory in 2017 as a member of the Division of Regenerative Medicine and the Moores Cancer Center, the primary focus of the Crews Laboratory has been on multiple myeloma translational research. Her ongoing work aims to delve deeper into the molecular mechanisms of myeloma initiation and progression, with the goal of identifying novel, more selective therapies to treat individuals with this incurable cancer.
Program Name(s)
Career Development Program
Project Title
Matthew Frank
Lymphoma CART therapy
Matthew Frank, MD PhD
Palo Alto, CA
United States
Stanford University
I am a physician-scientist and an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Blood and Marrow Transplantation and Cellular Therapy (BMT&CT). Clinically, I care for patients with high-risk lymphoma and other blood cancers. I am the principal investigator of clinical trials investigating novel chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapies for the treatment of relapsed and refractory leukemia and lymphoma. These trials, in part, provide the critical and precious patient samples that are the subject of my laboratory-based research efforts. My research group is dedicated to understanding the clinical outcomes of our patients who receive these immunotherapies with the goal of improving clinical response while minimizing toxicity.
Program Name(s)
Academic Clinical Trials Program (ACT)
Project Title
Autologous CD22 CAR T cell Therapy for the Treatment of non-Hodgkin Lymphoma
Todd Fehniger
NK cell immunotherapy and pediatric AML
Todd Fehniger, MD PhD
St. Louis, MO
United States
Washington University in St. Louis
Dr. Fehniger is a physician-scientist that leads a research program focused on translational NK cell biology and therapy. His group pioneered studies characterizing memory-like (ML) NK cell biology and activity against AML and has led clinical trials advancing ML NK cell adoptive therapy for both adult and pediatric patients. Dr. Fehniger is director of the Biologic Therapies Core Facility and Laboratory Director of the Center for Gene and Cellular Immunotherapy. His team developed the platform and protocols for production of GMP grade ML NK cells for use in academic clinical trials. His lab performs correlative immunology to understand ML NK cell biology and identify mechanisms of resistance to NK cells in patients. Dr. Fehniger has extensive experience in human NK cell biology, flow and mass cytometry, single cell analysis, and immunotherapy. For the proposed clinical trial, Dr. Fehniger will work with clinical co-investigators in pediatric and adult stem cell transplant programs.
Program Name(s)
Academic Clinical Trials Program (ACT)
Project Title
NK cell immunotherapy to reduce relapse after haploidentical transplant for high-risk pediatric AML
John Leonard
lymphoma research
John Leonard, MD
New York, NY
United States
Weill Cornell Medicine
John P. Leonard, MD, is the Richard T. Silver Distinguished Professor of Hematology and Medical Oncology and Senior Associate Dean for Innovation and Initiatives at Weill Cornell Medicine. He is Executive Vice Chairman of the Weill Department of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine and New York-Presbyterian Hospital. Dr. Leonard’s research has been published in numerous medical journals, and he has served as a member of the editorial boards of Blood and the Journal of Clinical Oncology, leading international journals in these fields. He is Chair of the Lymphoma Committee of the Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology, a multicenter cooperative group and key component of the National Cancer Institute’s National Clinical Trials Network. Dr. Leonard’s primary research interest is in the development of novel therapeutic strategies for the treatment of lymphoma and related hematologic malignancies, and he has lectured at major international meetings on these topics. He also has studied prognostic, imaging and survivorship issues for lymphoma patients.
Program Name(s)
IMPACT
Project Title
BRIDGE (Blood cancer Research Initiative Developing Greater Engagement) with community patients
Jae Park
leukemia
Jae Park, MD
New York, NY
United States
Sloan Kettering Institute for Cancer Research
Jae Park, MD is an Attending Physician and Chief of Cellular Therapy Service, and a Director of Adult Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia Program at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Dr. Park has written over 100 peer-reviewed articles appearing in New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, Nature Medicine, Science Translational Medicine, Blood, Cancer Discovery and Journal of Clinical Oncology focused on developing effective and safe targeted and immunotherapies and conducting translational studies. To this end, he has successfully conducted over 15 investigator-initiated therapeutic trials in the field of hematologic malignancies and cellular therapy with grant supports from ASH, LLS, ASCO, AACR and NCCN. He is widely recognized as one of the world experts in the field of CAR T cell therapies and ALL and is the leading PI of clinical trials in patients with ALL and CLL/NHL using CAR T, NK cell therapies, BiTEs, IDCs, targeted agents, and immunomodulators.
Program Name(s)
Academic Clinical Trials Program (ACT)
Hairy Cell Leukemia Research Initiative
Project Title
IL7 receptor-targeted CAR T-cell Therapy for T-Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (T-ALL)
Developing novel therapeutic approaches for classical and variant hairy cell leukemia
Christian Marinaccio
MLL leukemias
Christian Marinaccio, PhD
Boston, MA
United States
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
Christian Marinaccio is a research fellow in Dr. Scott Armstrong laboratory at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. After graduating with a master of science in medical Biotechnology from University of Bari, Italy, he joined the laboratory of John D Crispino at Northwestern University to pursue a PhD in Life Sciences focused on blood malignancies. Under the supervision of Dr. Crispino, his research focused on mechanisms of progression from myeloproliferative neoplasms (MPNs) to acute myeloid leukemia (AML). Currently, his research interests lay in the study of mechanisms of fusion protein turnover in KMT2A rearranged leukemias and in the study of leukemic transformation processes at the hematopoietic stem cell level, including cell of origin and clonal dynamics.
Program Name(s)
Career Development Program