Who We Fund

Columbia University Medical Center

Jennifer Amengual, MD is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Columbia University in the Division of Hematology and Oncology. As a physician-scientist, her research goals are to directly translate observations and concepts developed in the laboratory to rational targeted therapies for patients with lymphoma. Dr. Amengual has led many investigator-initiated trials based on data generated in her laboratory through the NCI Cooperative Group Networks, SWOG and ETCTN. Columbia University is a tertiary care center that performs a high number of organ transplants and has an enrichment of PTLD patients. This has generated great interest in how to improve screening and treatment for these patients. Dr. Amengual has spearheaded a PTLD working group that encompasses transplant, infectious disease, lymphoma and cellular therapy specialists from both the adult and pediatric groups. This has led to the development of several studies providing the foundation for the proposed clinical trial.

Program Name(s)

Academic Clinical Trials Program (ACT)

Project Title

Defining ctDNA monitoring and immune modulation in a novel, risk stratified clinical trial for PTLD

Columbia University Medical Center

I am a pediatric oncologist and health outcomes researcher at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. My research aims to identify how social determinants of health drive care and outcomes in children, adolescents, and young adults (AYA) with leukemia and lymphoma. At Columbia, I am the institutional Principal Investigator for the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute ALL Consortium and I serve on the Children’s Oncology Group Hodgkin Lymphoma (HL) Steering Committee. In these roles I participate in the design and implementation of new clinical trials, and in the development of embedded health services studies. My recent work includes a series of large-scale analyses (using clinical trials and population data) evaluating outcomes by race/ethnicity and age in ALL and HL. Increasingly, I am working to identify barriers to clinical trial participation among diverse populations, and on leveraging the clinical trial infrastructure to collect prospective data on social determinants of health.

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

Project Title

Leveraging cancer registries, clinical trials, and community partnerships to address disparities in pediatric, adolescent, and young adult lymphoma

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)

Dare to Dream

Specialized Center of Research Program

Translational Research Program

Project Title

Novel Immunotherapeutic Development in Childhood AML

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

Novel immunotherapeutic strategies in infants with high risk AML

Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis

Dr. Magee directs the pediatric leukemia and lymphoma program at Washington University School of Medicine and St. Louis Children’s Hospital. He received his M.D. and Ph.D. from Washington University and then completed a pediatrics residency and hematology/oncology fellowship at the University of Michigan. He conducted postdoctoral research with Dr. Sean Morrison (Howard Hughes Medical Institute) at the University of Michigan and UT-Southwestern. Dr. Magee’s work focuses on causes and treatments for childhood acute myeloid leukemia. He has published several papers in high impact journals investigating interactions between genes that regulate normal childhood blood development and mutations that cause leukemia, with the goal of understanding why childhood leukemias respond differently to treatment than adult leukemias. He is also investigating changes in blood forming stem cells that lead to leukemia when children receive chemotherapy for other tumors, such as lymphomas or solid tumors.

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

Project Title

Neonatal origins of pediatric AML

Baylor College of Medicine

Dr. Rouce is a pediatric oncologist and physician scientist whose clinical research focuses on difficult-to-treat blood cancers, specifically how to harness the immune system to attack them. She has spent the past 12 years in the Center for Cell and Gene Therapy at Texas Children’s Hospital leading a research program translating genetically engineered immune cells to first-in-human immunotherapy trials. She has significant experience in every aspect of clinical trial development and in addition to serving as principal investigator on CAR-T trials for blood cancers, has served as Project Leader for projects for the NIH Lymphoma SPORE, LLS Specialized Center of Research, and Stand Up to Cancer. She leads health equity and disparities initiatives locally and nationally and is dedicated to addressing access barriers to novel cancer clinical trials for children, adolescents/young adults, underrepresented minorities, patients with limited resources and those with geographic constraints.

Program Name(s)

Academic Clinical Trials Program (ACT)

Project Title

Novel CD7 CAR T-cells for refractory T-cell malignancies affecting pediatric and AYA patients

University of Virginia

I am a trained clinical hematopathologist and physician-scientist who is well versed in both basic and translational studies in hematologic tumors, with a special interest and emphasis in B-cell malignancies: the genetic and epigenetic mechanisms of tumor microenvironment (TME)-induced survival and drug resistance. My long-term goal is to characterize the pathobiology of B-cell lymphomas, especially aggressive B-cell malignancies, and the evolution of resistance to drugs and, more recently, immunotherapy.

Over the last decade, I have developed an active and unique research program for drug screening, chemical proteomics profiling, bulk and scRNAseq, ChIP-seq, ATAC, scATAC, functional pharmacogenomic computational biology, and multiplex immune profiling, and applied it to cell line and primary lymphoma samples to determine the major intrinsic and TME extrinsic molecular determinants governing lymphoma cell response and resistance. By capitalizing a “” opportunity and approach, my long-term goal is to provide major advances in our understanding of the lymphoma biology, develop innovative therapies and exert an immediate favorable impact on treatment for lymphoma patients.

My extensive background in cancer biology and clinical hematology/oncology, with my expertise in novel lymphoma therapies and therapy resistance, make me well-suited to serve as a Principal Investigator on many projects.

Program Name(s)

Mantle Cell Lymphoma Research Initiative

Project Title

Understanding Resistance Mechanism to Enhance CAR-T Immunotherapy for MCL

The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center

Dr. Michael Green is an Associate Professor and Vice Chair for Research in the Department of Lymphoma & Myeloma at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. Dr. Green has led ground-breaking studies analyzing primary samples from patients receiving CAR T cell therapy to identify cellular features associated with outcome and both acute and chronic toxicities. Dr. Green has led the development of a large patient derived xenograft (PDX) repository at MD Anderson that includes models from post-CAR T relapse tumors that serve as important model systems for this study.

Program Name(s)

Discovery

Project Title

Investigating the role of CREBBP mutations and epigenetic crosstalk in B-cell lymphoma

Multiplexed epigenome engineering of solutions to major CAR T-cell barriers