Who We Fund

Beckman Research Institute of the City of Hope

Dr. Danilov earned his medical degree and PhD in Physiology in Russia. He is a physician-scientist with background in molecular biology and oncologic drug development and expertise in cancer cell signaling. He leads an independent research program in hematologic malignancies which bridges the understanding of B-cell biology with early clinical evaluation of novel therapeutics.

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

Translational Research Program

Project Title

Overcoming ibrutinib resistance in mantle cell lymphoma

Enhancing efficacy of cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitors in diffuse large B-cell lymphoma

The Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania, Medical Center

Dr. June is the Richard W. Vague Professor in Immunotherapy in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and is currently Director of the Center for Cellular Immunotherapies at the Perelman School of Medicine, and Director of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a graduate of the Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD and Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, TX. In 2011, his research team published findings detailing a new therapy in which patients with refractory and relapsed chronic lymphocytic leukemia were treated with genetically engineered versions of their own T cells, CAR-Ts. CTL019, the CAR T cell developed in the June laboratory was the first cell and gene therapy to be approved by the US FDA. He has published more than 500 manuscripts and is the recipient of numerous honors, including a lifetime achievement award from the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

Program Name(s)

Specialized Center of Research Program

Project Title

Pan-heme CAR: Anti-CD38 CAR T cells for myeloid, lymphoid and plasma cell malignancies

University of Florida

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

Duke University

I am a board-certified oncologist and palliative care physician, Associate Professor of Medicine in the Duke University School of Medicine, and member of the Duke Cancer Institute. My practice focuses on the care of patients with blood cancers, while my research examines “patient experience” issues in hematology. As founding director of the Cancer Patient Experience Research Program (CPEP), I conduct randomized trials of integrated palliative care interventions in cancer care, and other patient experience studies, and have published over 175 manuscripts to date. I co-led the first-ever multisite, randomized trial of integrated palliative care in hematology, showing that palliative care integration dramatically improves quality of life, anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress among patients with acute myeloid leukemia hospitalized for high-dose chemotherapy. I am widely recognized as a leading expert in palliative care and patient experience research in hematology.

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

Project Title

Patient Experience Research and Palliative Care Integration in Malignant Hematology

Stanford University

Dr. Collins is a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Ravi Majeti’s lab at Stanford University and a senior clinical fellow in the Hematology and Oncology Department. Following her undergraduate studies at Williams College, Dr. Collins received her MD/PhD degree at the University of Michigan, where she worked with Dr. Jay Hess studying the role of collaborator proteins in HOXA9-mediated leukemic transformation. Her current research focuses on understanding mechanisms of preleukemic transformation in acute myeloid leukemia (AML) by prospectively modeling mutation acquisition in human hematopoietic stem cells. Throughout her training, Dr. Collins has remained passionate about her career as a physician-scientist, which presents the opportunity to care for patients with hematologic malignancies in the clinic, while also studying these diseases in the lab. Her ultimate goal is to identify a safe and well-tolerated therapy to selectively eradicate preleukemic stem cells and block the formation of AML.

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

Project Title

Investigating the role of preleukemia duration and clonal burden in progression to AML

The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia

Dr. Shannon Maude is a pediatric oncologist and clinical trialist in the Cancer Immunotherapy Program at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. Dr. Maude received her M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and completed her residency in pediatrics as well as fellowship in pediatric hematology-oncology at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Dr. Maude developed the Cancer Immunotherapy and BMT Fellowship at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and currently serves as a Medical Director in the Center for Cellular Immunotherapies at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Maude is a member of the Children’s Oncology Group ALL committee and leads investigator-initiated and international multi-center clinical trials of engineered T cell therapies for childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

Project Title

Improving CAR T-cell Therapy Efficacy in Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia by Optimizing Design and Placement

University of California, San Francisco

Dr. Elliot Stieglitz is a physician-scientist at the University of California, San Francisco whose research focuses on children diagnosed with juvenile myelomonocytic leukemia (JMML). He recently chaired a study, ADVL1512, a phase II clinical trial that tested the safety of trametinib in children with relapsed JMML. This trial met its primary objective and closed to accrual at the end of 2022. Dr. Stieglitz’s main laboratory focus is on developing novel therapies for JMML including CAR-T cells. He has generated patient-derived xenograft (PDX) models of JMML that will serve as the pre-clinical model in which to test CAR-T cells on this grant. These PDXs were generated in collaboration with Dr. Eric Padron, a key opinion leader in CMML and a collaborator on this grant. Dr. Stieglitz has also collaborated extensively with Dr. Tasian, an international leader in CAR-T therapy who is a Co-PI on this grant. This multi-disciplinary team will work together to advance CLL-1 CAR-T cells and trametinib into the clinic for CMML and JMML patients.

Program Name(s)

CMML Initiative

Project Title

CLL-1 CAR-T cells and trametinib for the treatment of Ras-mutated CMML and JMML

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Gianpietro Dotti, MD, is a Professor for the Department of Microbiology and Immunology and the Director of the Cellular Immunotherapy Program at Lineberger Cancer Center at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Dotti’s specializes in hematology and immunology. Since 2000, he has used his background in science and medicine to explore the use gene-modified T cells to treat hematologic malignancies, including lymphoma and leukemia, and solid tumors. His focus is primarily chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy that redirect the antigen specificity of T cells and strategies to overcome tumor inhibitory mechanisms.

Program Name(s)

Translational Research Program

Project Title

Targeting cathepsin G in acute myeloid leukemia