Who We Fund

Massachusetts General Hospital

Dr. Graubert is Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Hematologic Malignancy Program at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Cancer Center where he holds the Jon and JoAnn Hagler Chair in Oncology. Dr. Graubert is a physician-scientist with a laboratory-based research focus on the genetics of myeloid malignancies, including acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS). His group has used new technologies to identify genetic alterations in patients with MDS and AML, then created animal models to study their mechanism of action and susceptibility to novel therapies. In addition to his research, Dr. Graubert oversees faculty recruitment and development for the Hematologic Malignancy Program and provides clinical care in the Center for Leukemia. He co-leads the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Consortium Leukemia Program, is an Associate Member of the Broad Institute, and serves on scientific review panels for The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, the American Society of Hematology, the National Institutes of Health, and Genome Canada.

Program Name(s)

Specialized Center of Research Program

Project Title

Exploiting Vulnerabilities in RNA Splicing to Treat Hematologic Malignancies

Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, University Health Network

Tak W. Mak is an international leader in cancer and immunology research. He is best known for his cloning of the human T cell receptor in 1984, which led to the CAR-T therapies now approved for leukemias/lymphomas. His lab also generated numerous genetically modified mouse strains to identify key factors in immune disorders and cancers. His group’s demonstration that CTLA4 negatively regulates T cell activation paved the way for checkpoint inhibitor immunotherapy. Most recently, his team showed that T and B cells produce acetylcholine in a manner influencing tumorigenesis and autoimmunity. On the biotech front, Dr. Mak co-founded Agios Pharmaceuticals, which produced two IDH inhibitors that are now FDA-approved for treatment of AML. The Mak team has also developed two novel agents targeting aneuploid cancer cells. These agents have shown promise in phase 2 clinical trials. Dr. Mak has published >950 papers, holds 20 patents, and has received over 35 national and international awards.

Program Name(s)

Specialized Center of Research Program

Project Title

The Immune Niche in the Development of Hematological Malignancies and Implications for Novel Therapy

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

Dr. Hormoz is an Assistant Professor with the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School and Department of Data Science at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He obtained his PhD in Applied Physics from Harvard University. His postdoctoral studies were conducted jointly as a theorist at the Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics (UCSB), and as an experimentalist at Caltech. Hormoz lab’s mission is to control biological systems to understand life and cure disease such as cancer. His lab develops new technologies for recording and measuring the molecular states of individual cells and computational frameworks for interpreting the large data sets that these measurements generate. Dr. Hormoz’s research on blood cancers has focused on reconstructing the history of cancer in individual patients to understand when cancer first occurs and how cancer cells expand in each patient.

Program Name(s)

Discovery

Project Title

Predicting progression in myeloproliferative neoplasm patients by reconstructing the history of disease in each patient

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

Inflammation-responsive mechanisms of malignant stem cell generation and eradication in multiple myeloma

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