Who We Fund

University of Cincinnati

Eric J. Vick, MD, PhD is a physician-scientist at the University of Cincinnati who studies how blood cancers such as acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) survive and resist therapy. His research focuses on inflammatory signaling pathways that leukemia cells use to grow, with the goal of identifying new, mechanism-based treatment strategies. His CDP project investigates dependencies created by blocking IRAK4 signaling to uncover vulnerabilities in leukemia stem and progenitor cells.

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

Project Title

Targeting Myeloid Malignancies through IRAK4 Synthetic Lethality Dependencies

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

Robert J. Soiffer, MD, is Chief of the Division of Hematologic Malignancies and Chair of the Executive Committee for Clinical Programs at Dana Farber Cancer Institute as well as the Worthington and Margaret Collette Professor of Medicine in the Field of Hematologic Oncology at Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Soiffer served as President of the American Society for Transplant and Cellular Therapies and Chair of the Advisory Board for the Center for International Blood and Marrow Transplant Research. He is a member of the Executive Steering Committees for Blood and Marrow Transplant Clinical Trials Network. Dr. Soiffer is Immediate Past Chair of the Board of Directors for the National Marrow Donor Program.

Dr. Soiffer conducts research focused on modulation of immune reconstitution in the setting of allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (allo-HCT). His goal is to develop technologies to improve patient outcomes by optimizing graft versus leukemia (GVL) activity without inducing graft versus host disease (GVHD). Dr. Soiffer has co-authored more than 400 peer-reviewed manuscripts and numerous book chapters, review articles, editorials, and monographs.

Program Name(s)

Specialized Center of Research Program

Project Title

Understanding and Overcoming Mechanisms of Immune Evasion after Allogeneic Transplant

Columbia University Medical Center

Dr. Doulatov is an Associate Professor at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. His laboratory investigates how normal hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) transform into blood cancers. As an undergraduate at UCLA with Dr. Jeff Miller, he discovered a new class of retroelements. As a Ph.D. student with Dr. John Dick at the University of Toronto, he helped establish the “roadmap” of the human HSC and progenitor hierarchy. As a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. George Daley at Harvard, he identified methods to promote HSC development from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). These advances have enabled the use of iPSCs as a platform for disease modeling and drug screens, leading to the discovery of a drug for inherited anemia. The Doulatov laboratory is using human iPSCs and HSCs to discover how oncogenic mutations cooperate to transform normal stem cells into leukemias. His long-term goal is to develop treatments that target malignant stem cells leading to lasting remissions for patients.

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

Project Title

Modeling and targeting leukemic transformation of human hematopoietic stem cells

Yale University

The first-generation in his family to attend college, Dr. Girardi is the Evans Professor of Dermatology and Vice Chair of Faculty Development & Scientific Innovation at the Yale School of Medicine. The previous Co-Director of the Immunology and Immunotherapy Program for the Yale Cancer Center, Dr. Girardi has committed his career as a physician-scientist to the care of lymphoma patients and the discovery of new treatments. Dr. Girardi has led a highly collaborative research program funded by the National Cancer Institute for 20+ years investigating lymphoma and immunology, including major findings on the genetics, therapeutics development, and formulation of treatment guidelines through the U.S. Cutaneous Lymphoma Consortium and International Society of Cutaneous Lymphoma. Dr. Girardi also serve on the Leadership Council for Advancing Innovation in Dermatology and has been elected to the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the Association of American Physicians.

Program Name(s)

Translational Research Program

Project Title

Personalized Anti-TCRVbeta2 therapeutic antibody and ADC for T Cell Leukemias and Lymphomas

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

I am an Assistant Professor at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) specializing in clinical investigations of CLL. Until 2021, I served as PI of investigator-sponsored studies at the NIH, including two trials specifically designed for CLL patients with high-risk genomic features. These efforts provided the largest and longest follow-up experience available for TP53 aberrant CLL treated with ibrutinib and revealed BTK mutations leading to treatment resistance. My immediate research goal is to apply the skills and knowledge learned from the previous work to investigate mechanisms of drug resistance emerging after targeted combination therapy. I have established collaboration with other investigators and am prospectively collecting research samples from a phase 2 study of zanubrutinib and venetoclax (NCT05168930). I envision data from the study will establish genomic markers as a decision-making tool that informs the selection of treatment regimens and modification of treatment duration.

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

Project Title

Clinical and molecular determinants of CLL eradication with targeted combination therapy

University of Colorado Denver, Anschutz Medical Campus

Dr. Eric Pietras is an Associate Professor of Medicine in the Division of Hematology at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. He completed his PhD training in microbiology and immunology at UCLA in 2008. He subsequently joined the laboratory of Dr. Emmanuelle Passegué for postdoctoral training and started his independent faculty position at the University of Colorado in November of 2015, earning promotion to Associate Professor in July 2021. Dr. Pietras leads a research program that leverages his dual backgrounds in innate immunity and hematopoiesis, focusing on the interplay between inflammation and oncogenic mutations as a trigger for alterations in hematopoietic stem and progenitor cell (HSC) metabolism that promote evolution to malignancy. The goal of his lab is to identify novel approaches for targeting this pathogenic process to disrupt myeloid oncogenesis and improve patient outcomes.

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

Project Title

Targeting the pathogenic 'fire triangle' of inflammation, metabolism and mutations in myeloid leukemogenesis

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

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Research

Qian Zhang is a postdoctoral fellow in the Dr. Abdel-Wahab’s lab at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. She developed synthetic introns to selectively targeting U2AF1 mutated myeloid cells. U2AF1 mutations characterize high risk forms of MDS and are also common in elderly patients with AML. She aims to optimize these synthetic introns and develop novel lipid nanoparticles delivery of the synthetic introns into mice. Qian received her Ph.D. training in the Dr. Krainer lab at Cold spring harbor laboratory, where she developed novel RNA therapeutics to target a driver mutation of a deadly pediatric brain tumor known as Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Gliomas. This work was published in Science Translational Medicine with Qian as a first author. She also contributed to the development of innovative RNA therapeutics to modulate RNA splicing in cystic fibrosis. Qian is a key coauthor for these studies that were published in papers in Nucleic Acids Research, PNAS, and Nature Communications.

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

Project Title

Synthetic introns to target U2AF1 mutant leukemias and dissect molecular basis for mis-splicing

Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center

Dr. Soheil Meshinchi is a physician scientist and a Full Member at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, as well as Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Washington School of Medicine. With over 25 years of experience in AML biology, he chairs the COG Myeloid Disease Biology Committee and the NCI designated Hematopoietic Integrated Science Center (HM-ITSC) to help translate laboratory discoveries into clinical practice. He leads the novel target and biomarker discovery for the LLS Children’s Initiative and the Pediatric Acute Leukemia (PedAL) efforts. As the director of NCI TARGET AML initiative and the Target Pediatric AML (TpAML), , he has led multi-omic studies of over 3000 children and young adults; Studies including Whole Genome Sequencing, Transcriptome sequencing, miRNA sequencing, Methylation profiling as well as the ongoing long read RNA sequencing to fully define splice isoforms in normal and malignant hematopoiesis.

Program Name(s)

Academic Clinical Trials Program (ACT)

Specialized Center of Research Program

Project Title

Multi-modal Immunotherapeutic Targeting of AML-restricted Targets in Infants and Children

First in Human Mesothelia-Directed Artemis CART in Childhood AML

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center

I am a medical oncologist with the Myeloma Service and a member of the Cellular Therapeutics Center and the Center for Health Policy and Outcomes at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. My research focuses on the clinical development of novel immune and cellular therapies for patients with multiple myeloma and translational research focused on better understanding the responses to cellular therapies and possible mechanisms of relapse. I am the principal investigator for multiple chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T trials for multiple myeloma, including the first trials of an allogeneic CAR T cell therapy and autologous GPRC5D CAR T cells for myeloma .

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

Project Title

Improving outcomes with immune therapies for multiple myeloma

Stanford

Coming soon.

Program Name(s)

Student Mentorship and Research Training (SMART)

Project Title

Profiling Autoantibody Responses in Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) Using REAP and Clinically Annotated Biobank Data

Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania

Dr. Liling Wan is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She received a B.S. in Biological Sciences and Biotechnology from Tsinghua University and a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from Princeton University. She conducted postdoctoral research at Rockefeller University where she studied chromatin regulators in cancer. The Wan lab studies basic gene regulatory mechanisms and how these mechanisms are dysregulated in cancer, with the goal of harnessing these insights for therapeutics. Her research has revealed how chromatin “reader” proteins impact gene regulation in cancer such as acute myeloid leukemia and led to early drug development efforts targeting these mechanisms. Dr. Wan has been recognized for her innovative and impactful research through numerous awards including AACR NextGen Star, NIH Pathway to Independence Award, the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, and was recently named a Pew-Stewart Scholar, V Foundation Scholar, and ASH Scholar.

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

Project Title

Epigenetic Mechanisms in Acute Myeloid Leukemia