Who We Fund

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

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

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

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

Moffitt Cancer Center

Eric Padron, MD is an Associate Member and Scientific Director of the Department of Hematology at Moffitt Cancer Center (MCC). He completed a hematology oncology fellowship and was recruited to MCC in 2013. Dr. Padron’s research focus has centered on studying clonal hematopoiesis (CH) and chronic myeloid neoplasms across the translational research spectrum. Importantly, he has published seminal work establishing key biologic features, novel treatments, and clinical trials in CMML. Further, Dr. Padron is an R37 MERIT awardee from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) for his work in chronic myelomonocytic leukemia and has published more than 175 peer reviewed articles describing advances in myeloid malignancies and hematologic conditions, including CH. Dr. Padron is among the few physician-scientists with experience both in leading multi-institution trials and a successful NCI funded laboratory making him uniquely suited to lead this proposal.

Program Name(s)

CMML Initiative

Project Title

Advancing the therapeutic landscape for Chronic Myelomonocytic Leukemia (CMML)

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center

Dr. Falchi graduated Cum Laude from the University of Perugia, Italy. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at MD Anderson Cancer Center, residency at Yale-New Haven Hospital, and Hematology/Oncology fellowship at Columbia University Medical Center. He is currently an Assistant Attending in the Lymphoma and Cellular Therapy Services at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

Dr. Falchi’s research focuses on the use of immunotherapy to treat B-cell NHL. He leads multiple such trials nationally and internationally. He authored or co-authored over 75 articles published in peer-reviewed journals, numerous abstracts, and several book chapters. 

Dr. Falchi is Co-Editor-In-Chief of Oncoimmunology, Editorial Board Member for Blood Advances, and recurrent peer-reviewer for high-profile journals. He is recipient of several awards, including a Lymphoma Research Foundation Career Development Award. He is an active member of several scientific societies, including the American Society of Hematology.

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

Project Title

Leveraging multispecific antibodies to reshape the treatment landscape of B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma

OHSU Knight Cancer Institute

Samantha Tauchmann Ph.D. is a postdoc at the Oregon Health & Science University. She received a B.S. in Molecular Life Sciences from Maastricht University in the Netherlands and her M.Sc. in Biomedical Sciences from the Transnational University Limburg. She completed her PhD under the mentorship of Prof. Dr. Jürg Schwaller at the University Children`s Hospital Basel in Switzerland, where she investigated the role of the methyltransferase NSD1 and the key erythroid transcription factor, GATA1, in erythroleukemia. Dr. Tauchmann joined the Maxson laboratory in February 2023. Her postdoctoral studies are focused on uncovering how SETBP1 mutations contribute to leukemia by modulating the function of methyltransferases. With a strong commitment to understanding blood cell development and leukemia biology, Dr. Tauchmann aspires to identify new therapeutics for SETBP1-mutant leukemias. Her long-term goal is to run an academic laboratory focused on epigenetic dysregulation in blood cancers.

Project Title

Histone methyltransferases as key dependencies in SETBP1-mutant leukemias

Medical College of Wisconsin

Nirav Shah, MD, MSHP is currently an Associate Professor of Medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin, Division of Hematology and Oncology, specializing in lymphoma, stem cell transplant, and CAR-T therapy. He graduated with honors and Alpha Omega Alpha honor society membership from University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine in 2008. He then completed his Internal Medicine residency at the Harvard affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital in 2011. Following residency, he went to the University of Pennsylvania where he completed Hematology/Oncology fellowship and received a Master of Science in Health Policy research in 2015. His current focus is the development of dual targeted anti-CD20, anti-CD19 CAR-T cells (CAR20.19) for B-cell malignancies. Results of a Phase 1 trial with CAR20.19 T-cells were published in Nature Medicine in Oct. 2020. Data from that study directed development of three new CAR20.19 clinical trials led by Dr. Shah all actively enrolling patients.

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

Project Title

Improving Bispecific CD20/CD19 CAR T-cell Therapy to Overcome Resistance Mechanisms in B-cell Malignancies

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

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

Early Detection and Intervention in Smoldering Multiple Myeloma: population-based screening and treatment; Edit-SMM

Moffitt Cancer Center

Gary Reuther, PhD (Professor in the Departments of Molecular Oncology and Malignant Hematology at the Moffitt Cancer Center) earned his PhD from Duke University and did his post-doctoral training with Channing Der (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), where he studied signaling by the RAS oncoprotein and identified novel leukemia oncogenes. His current research centers on JAK2 signaling and novel therapeutic strategies for MPNs. Over the past 20 years, he has obtained research funding from multiple NIH R01 grants, the MPN Research Foundation, the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, the Department of Defense, and the V Foundation for Cancer Research, and was the recipient of an American Cancer Society Research Scholar Award and an NIH/NCI Howard Temin Award. His experience leading research that led to this funding and successful completion and publication of these projects makes him highly qualified to serve as the PI on the proposed studies.

Program Name(s)

Translational Research Program

Project Title

Novel therapeutic strategies to improve the outcomes of patients with myeloproliferative neoplasms

The University of Melbourne

Dr. Lev Kats is head of the Targeted Therapeutics Laboratory at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre. He completed his PhD at Monash University and postdoctoral training at Beth Israel Deaconess Centre/Harvard Medical School. Dr. Kats has made major contributions in the areas of targeted therapies, epigenetics and hematological malignancies including through discovery of important functions of cancer promoting genes and the characterization of the molecular mechanisms of anti-leukemic drugs. His laboratory uses model systems, functional and molecular genomics approaches to develop and test new therapeutic strategies for aggressive blood cancers.

Program Name(s)

Translational Research Program

Targeting DCAF1 as a novel treatment strategy for therapy resistant multiple myeloma