Who We Fund

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

Dr. Mark Murakami is a physician-scientist dedicated to advancing curative treatments for follicular lymphoma. Based in the Division of Hematologic Neoplasia at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Dr. Murakami leads a research group focused on understanding how minute numbers of lymphoma cells survive the initial effect of treatment, persist even when patients are in clinical remission, and later expand to cause relapse. Eradication of these rare cells, called minimal residual disease, is felt to be the key to curing follicular lymphoma. Dr. Murakami has dedicated his career to developing methods for tracking, isolating, and analyzing minimal residual disease and understanding how these cells evade pharmacologic therapy as well as the anti-lymphoma immune response. He uses this information to devise novel treatments for rigorous evaluation – first in the laboratory and eventually in clinical trials run by clinical colleagues – that we hope will cure follicular lymphoma.

Program Name(s)

Translational Research Program

Project Title

Exploiting tumor-immune dynamics to inform curative combination therapy for follicular lymphoma

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

Dr. Adi Nagler received her Ph.D. at the Weizmann Institute of Science in 2021, under the mentorship of Prof. Yardena Samuels. There, she spearheaded studies that identified intra-tumoral intracellular bacterial peptides eliciting an immune response by melanoma-infiltrating lymphocytes, suggesting a novel source of antigens within tumors (Kalaora & Nagler Nature 2021). As a postdoctoral fellow in Prof. Catherine Wu’s lab, she is studying the impact of the microbiome on T cell response in bronchiolitis obliterans syndrome (BOS) following allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT). She is applying spatial transcriptomics methodology together with characterization of the immunopeptidome of BOS tissue specimens to define the role of bacterial presented peptides in the pathogenesis of this devastating complication of HCT. Overall, her studies aim is to explore the potential link between T cell antigen specificity to these microbial peptides and initiation and propagation of BOS.

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

Project Title

The microbiome-induced immune response role in bronchiolitis obliterans syndrome following allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation

Albert Einstein College of Medicine

Dr. Will has been a group leader at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine since 2016. She obtained her Ph.D. in Cell Biology from the University of Freiburg, Germany and underwent further training in hematology/oncology with Dr. Ulrich Steidl. With a passion for and through the lens of stem cell biology, Britta’s laboratory seeks to discover novel therapeutic options for patients with myeloid malignancies. Current research concentrates on two largely uncharted territories in blood stem cell aging and leukemic stem cell maintenance - iron homeostasis and highly selective autophagy. Dr. Will also serves as co-leader of the Stem Cell and Cancer Biology Program and directs the Cancer Stem Cell Pharmacodynamics Unit at the NCI-designated Montefiore-Einstein Cancer Center. She is the recipient of prestigious young investigator awards, including from the Pershing Square Sohn Cancer Research Alliance, Gilead, AAMDSIF, Feldstein Medical Foundation, and the Leukemia Research Foundation.

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

Project Title

Therapeutically actionable molecular safeguards in leukemic stem cells

The University of Melbourne

Professor Ricky Johnstone received his PhD from the University of Melbourne (UoM) in 1993 and after studying as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School established the Gene Regulation Laboratory at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in 2000. Promoted to Full Professor at UoM in 2011 he has published more than 250 peer-reviewed papers. In addition to running his own laboratory, he is now the Executive Director of Cancer Research at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre overseeing ~700 staff and students. In 2015 he was elected as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences and in 2020 he was named by PLOS Biology as in the top 0.14% of authors for his research subfield of Oncology & Carcinogenesis.

Prof Johnstone is a cancer researcher who has utilized genetic mouse models of leukemia and lymphoma to understand the epigenetic changes that underpin tumor onset and progression and to develop new therapies for clinical trial.

Program Name(s)

Translational Research Program

Project Title

Dissecting the biology and exploiting the dependency of myeloma cells on P300/CBP

The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia

Dr Tasian is a pediatric oncologist and physician-scientist who is interested in development of molecularly-targeted therapeutics for children with high-risk leukemias. She specializes in the clinical care of children with leukemia and lymphoma, is an internationally-recognized expert in pediatric ALL and AML, and serves as the Chief of the Hematologic Malignancies Program at CHOP. Her bench-to-bedside and bedside-back-to-bench translational laboratory research program focuses upon testing of kinase inhibitors and chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell immunotherapies in genetic subsets of childhood ALL and AML. Dr Tasian has leadership roles in the Children’s Oncology Group (COG) ALL and Myeloid Diseases committees and LLS PedAL/EuPAL consortium, is the COG Developmental Therapeutics committee Vice-Chair of Biology for Hematologic Malignancies, and leads or co-leads several national or international early phase clinical trials testing precision medicine therapies in children with high-risk leukemias.

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

Project Title

Precision Medicine Inhibitor and Immunotherapy Approaches for High-Risk Childhood Leukemias

University of Southern California

Dr. Sheng Li is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Translational Genomics, at the Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California (USC). She is the Program Co-Leader of Epigenetic Regulation in Cancer (ERC) at the USC NCI-designated Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center. Dr. Li received her PhD in Computational Biology from Cornell University in 2014, where she focused on the epigenome dynamics of leukemia relapse. Following her PhD, she served as an Instructor of Bioinformatics at Weill Cornell Medicine. In 2016, Dr. Li joined the Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2022.

In 2024, her lab transitioned to the USC Keck School of Medicine. Dr. Li leads a research program centered on understanding the impact of somatic mutations and aging on blood cancer initiation by identifying critical epigenetic aberrations that disrupt gene expression regulating hematopoiesis. Her work leverages multi-omics and integrative data mining to study how age-related inflammation shapes the evolutionary trajectories of mutant hematopoietic stem cells in leukemogenesis. The long-term goal of her research is to identify novel therapeutics to mitigate leukemogenesis and extend human health span and life span. Dr. Li recevied NextGen Star Award from American Association for Cancer Research and Maximizing Investigators' Research Award from NIH National Institute of General Medical Sciences.

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

Project Title

Epigenetic heterogeneity in age-related clonal hematopoiesis and acute myeloid leukemia

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.

New York University School of Medicine

Susan Schwab is an Associate Professor at New York University Grossman School of Medicine, where she studies how immune cells navigate through the body to reach sites of disease. She is fascinated by parallels between how normal immune cells traffic to inflamed tissues and how leukemia T cells colonize healthy tissues such as the brain. Dr. Schwab received her PhD from the University of California Berkeley, and completed her post-doctoral training at the University of California San Francisco. For her work, she has been named a Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences and received a Cancer Research Institute Investigator Award.

Program Name(s)

Discovery

Project Title

T cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia accumulation in the central nervous system

University of Florida

TAP Partner

ImCheck Therapeutics is designing and developing a new generation of immunotherapeutic antibodies targeting butyrophilins, a novel super-family of immunomodulators. These “first-in-class” activating antibodies may be able to produce superior clinical results as compared to the first-generation of immune checkpoint inhibitors and, when used in combination, to overcome resistance to this group of agents.

Program Name(s)

Therapy Acceleration Program

Project Title

A phase 1 expansion study of ICT01, an anti-BTN3A monoclonal antibody, in combination with azacitidine and venetoclax in patients with AML

The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center

Koichi Takahashi, MD, PhD is Associate Professor in the Departments of Leukemia and Genomic Medicine at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. He received MD degree from Niigata University School of Medicine and PhD degree from Kyoto University School of Medicine, both in Japan. He then did internal medicine residency at Toranomon Hospital, Tokyo, Japan, and Beth Israel Medical Center in New York, followed by hematology and oncology fellowship at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. During the fellowship, he was trained in Dr. Andrew Futreal’s Lab for cancer genomics. He is board certified in Internal Medicine, Hematology, and Medical Oncology. Dr. Takahashi is well known for his research in delineating how selection of pre-existing clonal hematopoiesis under chemotherapy contributes to the development of therapy-related myeloid neoplasms. His laboratory uses state-of-the-art single-cell technologies to understand the mechanism of leukemia development and create strategies for early detection and prevention.

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

Project Title

Understanding the clonal origin, evolution, and progression of myeloid malignancies

Institute of Biomedical Research from Salamanca

Noemi Puig, MD, PhD earned her medical degree from the Universidad Complutense in Madrid and she completed her residency in Internal Medicine and Hematology at the University Hospital La Fe in Valencia, Spain. She completed a 3-year fellowship in Lymphoma, Myeloma and Autologous Stem Cell Transplantation at the Princess Margaret Hospital in the University of Toronto, in Toronto, Canada. She earned a doctoral degree at the Medicine Department of the University of Salamanca, in Spain, with a thesis entitled “Optimization and Critical Analysis of Minimal Residual Disease Monitoring with ASO RQ-PCR in Patients with Multiple Myeloma and Comparison with Multiparameter Flow Cytometry”. Dr. Puig currently serves as a Consultant Physician at the Hematology Department in the University Hospital of Salamanca. She also works in the Flow Cytometry Laboratory of the University Hospital of Salamanca, where she is responsible for the studies developed by the Spanish Myeloma Group.

Dr. Puig is a member of the Programa para el Estudio de la Terapéutica en Hemopatías Malignas (PETHEMA) and the Spanish Myeloma Group (GEM) as well as of the EuroFlow Group.

Dr. Puig´s main research interests include the role of multiparameter flow cytometry and of mass spectrometry in diagnosis, risk stratification and minimal residual disease monitoring in patients with monoclonal gammopathies. She is an author or co-author in several research articles, reviews and book chapters.

Program Name(s)

Translational Research Program

Project Title

Peripheral blood-based disease monitoring by mass spectrometry in patients with multiple myeloma