Siegfried Janz
Myeloma immunotherapy
Siegfried Janz, MD
Wauwatosa, WI
United States
Medical College of Wisconsin
Siegfried Janz, MD, DSc, Professor and William G. Schuett, Jr., Multiple Myeloma Endowed Chair directs translational myeloma research at the Division of Hematology, Oncology & Bone Marrow Transplantation, Department of Medicine, Medical College of Wisconsin Milwaukee. After obtaining his medical degree and board certification in Clinical Immunology from Leipzig University Medical School, Germany, he received advanced training in genetic and biological pathways of myeloma development at the National Cancer Institute, NIH, Bethesda, Maryland. In 2018 he relocated his laboratory to Milwaukee, where he works in close association with his clinical colleagues to enhance our understanding of the natural history of myeloma and improve myeloma treatment and outcomes. His ongoing efforts concentrate on the design and testing of novel immunotherapies that rely on patient-derived T lymphocytes to seek out and kill myeloma.
Program Name(s)
Translational Research Program
Project Title
Improving outcomes of multiple myeloma using TGF-beta resistant BCMA-targeted CAR T cells
Tanya Siddiqi
clinical trial access
Tanya Siddiqi, MD
Duarte, CA
United States
City of Hope National Medical Center
Dr. Siddiqi is an associate professor in the Department of Hematology/Hematopoietic Cell Transplantation and Director of the chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) program at COH. As an active member of the Toni Stephenson Lymphoma Center and the Immunotherapy Center at COH, she has been the institutional and, for some studies, national principal investigator of many phase 1, 2 and 3 clinical trials involving novel targeted therapies and cellular therapeutics such as chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells in CLL and non-Hodgkin lymphomas. She works closely with Cancer Therapy Evaluation Program (CTEP), cooperative groups, and pharmaceutical companies on important clinical trials in order to bring novel, potentially lifesaving, therapeutics to our patients. As of June 1, 2021, she will be the Lymphoma Medical Director at the Irvine campus, set up open August 2022, which puts her in an ideal position to open impactful hematology clinical trials at CAN sites, starting with Orange county.
Program Name(s)
IMPACT
Project Title
Establishing Hematology Clinical Trial Hubs within the City of Hope Community and Affiliate Network
Christopher Hergott, MD, PhD
Boston, MA
United States
Brigham and Women’s Hospital
Christopher Hergott, M.D., Ph.D. is a postdoctoral fellow at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) and Associate Pathologist in hematopathology at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) in Boston. He obtained his undergraduate degree in Biochemistry from the University of Rochester and his medical and graduate degrees from the University of Pennsylvania. He completed residency (and chief residency) in Clinical Pathology and a clinical fellowship in Hematopathology at BWH before beginning his postdoctoral research training in the laboratory of Dr. Benjamin Ebert at DFCI. Christopher's research interests lie at the intersection of inflammation and hematopoiesis, with a particular focus on clonal hematopoiesis and its progression to myeloid malignancies. In his free time, Christopher enjoys playing guitar, reading, and travelling.
Program Name(s)
Career Development Program
Project Title
Defining the role of IL-17A in propelling clonal cytopenia of undetermined significance
Yibin Yang
Lymphoma
Yibin Yang, PhD
Philadelphia, PA
United States
Fox Chase Cancer Center
I completed my Ph.D. training with Dr. Michelle Kelliher at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, studying the ubiquitin-dependent signal transduction pathways. With this foundation, I joined Dr. Louis Staudt’s laboratory at the National Cancer Institute as a research fellow in 2010 to exploit the roles of innate immune signaling and protein ubiquitination machinery in the pathogenesis of Diffuse Large B cell lymphoma. In 2015, I received an NCI Transition Career Development Award to further investigate the roles of immune signaling and protein ubiquitination in lymphoid malignancies. I accepted a tenure track faculty position and started my lab at Fox Chase Cancer Center (FCCC) as an Assistant Professor in May 2016. At FCCC, I decided to shift my studies to the field of Peripheral T-Cell lymphoma and Hodgkin lymphoma, which have minimal available targeted therapy options currently. The main focus of my laboratory is to understand the immune regulatory pathways in these lymphoid malignancies.
Program Name(s)
Career Development Program
Project Title
Jake Shortt
precision therapy for aggressive lymphomas
Jake Shortt, PhD
Clayton, VIC
Australia
Monash University
Professor Jake Shortt is a clinician scientist who is co-appointed by Monash Health as Director of Clinical Haematology and by Monash University as the Head of Haematology Research at the School of Clinical Sciences. Monash Health provides lymphoma services to the largest Australian healthcare network in the Australian state of Victoria. He is also an Honorary Clinical Professor at the Sir Peter MacCallum Department of Oncology, University of Melbourne.
Professor Shortt is group leader of the 'Blood Cancer Therapeutics Laboratory' at Monash, seeking to discover and translate new lymphoma treatments to the clinic. As a clinician scientist his research covers the full translational spectrum from scientific discovery to advanced clinical trials and registry initiatives. For more than a decade his research has focussed on poor-risk lymphoid cancers, particularly those hallmarked by activation of a gene called 'MYC' which features in some of the most aggressive lymphomas.
Program Name(s)
Translational Research Program
Project Title
Exploiting escape from Y-inactivation as a synthetic dependency in MYC-driven lymphoma
Alieen Rowan
Adult T cell leukemia/lymphoma
Alieen Rowan, PhD
London,
United Kingdom
Imperial College, University of London
After completing a PhD in Immunology at Trinity College Dublin, I moved to Imperial College London to study how persistent infection with a virus causes Leukemia, Lymphoma and other diseases. The virus in question is Human T cell leukemia virus type-1 (HTLV-1), which infects the very cells which defend us against viruses: T cells. Around 5% of virus-carriers develop aggressive blood cancer (Adult T cell leukemia/lymphoma, ATL), in which one infected T cell becomes malignant. ATL is very difficult to treat, and people with the most aggressive forms survive for less than a year. I made the game-changing discovery that ATL-like T cells circulate in the blood of carriers who go on to develop ATL years before they show symptoms of ATL. I am now developing new diagnostics which can detect ATL early, and together with clinicians at the U.K. National Centre for Human Retrovirology and the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre, will test whether a recently licenced drug can eliminate ATL-like T cells in high-risk carriers.
Program Name(s)
Translational Research Program
Project Title
Detection and treatment of Adult T cell leukemia/lymphoma in the premalignant stage.
Surbhi Sidana, MD
Stanford, CA
United States
Stanford
I am a hematologist/oncologist specializing in the treatment of multiple myeloma and related disorders. I am an Associate Professor in the Division of BMT/ Cell Therapy Division at Stanford University. I lead the Myeloma Disease Focused Group and am the Associate Director for Clinical Research for the Division. I have a broad research portfolio that includes clinical trials of novel therapies in myeloma, translational and outcomes research. I have a special focus on immunotherapy related research and am the principal investigator of several clinical trials of CAR-T cell therapy and bispecific antibodies in myeloma. I also co-lead a multi-center consortium of academic medical centers in the US collaborating to generate insights from real-world application of CAR-T therapy and bispecific antibodies in myeloma. I am actively involved with cooperative groups and professional societies, including holding leadership positions with the goal of advancing treatment of hematological disorders.
Program Name(s)
Career Development Program
Project Title
Mignon Loh, MD
Seattle, WA
United States
Seattle Children's Hospital
Dr. Loh is a Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Washington and Seattle Children’s Hospital. She is the Division Head of Hematology, Oncology, Bone marrow transplant, and Cellular therapies and also directs the Ben Towne Center for Childhood Cancer and Blood Disorder Research. Over her 30-year career, Dr. Loh has studied primary patient samples in the laboratory to make seminal observations about leukemia pathogenesis that informs accurate molecular diagnoses, improves risk stratification, and identifies novel therapeutic approaches. These studies have been performed in juvenile myelomonocytic leukemia and acute lymphoblastic leukemia, leading to innovative clinical trials. Her strength as a collaborator and leader also allows her to capitalize on the expertise and strengths of individual scientists to create highly productive teams that produce cutting edge results, and this proposal will continue that trajectory with Dr. Price’s expertise.
Program Name(s)
Translational Research Program
Project Title
Affinity-Tuned T-Cell Engagers for Dual Targeting of B-Myeloid Mixed Phenotype Acute Leukemia
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 Blood Cancer United-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
Robert Williams, MD, PhD
New York, NY
United States
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
I earned a B.S. in Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where I began cancer research in Dr. Dane Wittrup’s laboratory studying combination immunotherapies in melanoma. I then worked in Dr. Cigall Kadoch’s lab on chromatin remodeling before matriculating into the Tri-Institutional MD-PhD program at Weill Cornell. For my thesis, I identified a transcription factor critical for asparagine synthesis in T-ALL - clinically relevant to L-asparaginase therapy. During my PhD I was awarded an NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein NRSA F30 with a top-10th-percentile score for this work. I subsequently matched into the Medical Research Track at Weill Cornell Medicine and completed internal medicine residency. I am now a second-year Hematology/Oncology fellow at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, studying epigenetic mechanisms of lymphomagenesis to develop clinically translatable biomarkers and targets for the patients with lymphoma.
Program Name(s)
Career Development Program
Project Title
Lori Muffly
Equity in Access
Lori Muffly, MD
Palo Alto, CA
United States
Stanford University
Dr. Lori Muffly MD MS is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Stanford University in the Division of Blood and Marrow Transplantation and Cellular Therapy. Dr. Muffly is a clinician and clinical investigator whose research includes both health outcomes and clinical trials pertaining to adults with acute leukemia. Her clinical practice serves adults across Northern California with advanced acute leukemias who require hematopoietic cell transplantation and other cellular immunotherapies. She has a specific research interest in improving access to specialty cancer care and reducing health disparities in young adults with acute lymphoblastic leukemia and has published extensively on these topics. She also serves as the PI of multiple investigator-initiated health outcomes studies and clinical trials, including studies evaluating measurable residual disease in adult acute lymphoblastic leukemia, novel chimeric antigen receptor T cell studies for acute leukemia, and she leads a recently established real world consortium investigating outcomes following cellular therapies administered to adults with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Dr. Muffly has successfully collaborated with Drs. Parsons and Keegan on several previous studies and publications related to adolescent and young adult leukemia and access to cancer care and has delivered numerous national talks on the subject.
Program Name(s)
Equity in Access
Project Title
Bailee Kain
AML and African ancestry
Bailee Kain, PhD
Cincinnati, OH
United States
Cincinnati Children's Hospital
Dr. Bailee Kain is from Geneseo, IL and received her B.S. in Biochemistry from University of Missouri in 2016. She completed her doctoral thesis work at Baylor College of Medicine in Dr. Katherine King's laboratory, where she studied how antigenically diverse pathogens reprogram hematopoietic stem cells to induce innate immune cross-protection. In November 2022, Bailee joined Dr. Lee Grimes lab at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center (CCHMC) as a postdoctoral research fellow. In the Grimes lab, she has focused on determining the oncogenic potential of novel variants found in African Ancestry AML patients, including PHIP. Through nominating PHIP as a functional oncogene, she hopes to combat cancer health disparities by making AML screening, risk stratification, and therapeutic strategies more inclusive. Following her training, Bailee's goal to is to develop an independent research program focused on understanding the disease mechanism of ancestry specific variants found in AML.
Program Name(s)
Career Development Program
Project Title
Functionalizing novel PHIP variants in ancestry-specific acute myeloid leukemia