Who We Fund

Durham VA Health Care System

Dr. Friedman is a hematologist-oncologist at the Durham VA Health Care System (DVAHCS) and National TeleOncology (NTO) Program, a Professor at the Duke University School of Medicine, and is the Deputy Director of the VA National Oncology Program. She is the DVAHCS site PI for the NCI and VA Interagency Group to Accelerate Trials Enrollment (NAVIGATE) program, which facilitates enrollment of Veterans with cancer into NCI-funded clinical trials. She is the lead for the Cancer Clinical Research Service (CCRS) in NTO, which offers clinical trial navigation to Veterans with cancer and runs decentralized cancer clinical trials across the VA network.

Program Name(s)

Equity in Access

Project Title

REACH: Researching & Enhancing Access to Clinical trials in Veterans with Hematologic cancers

University of Colorado Denver, Anschutz Medical Campus

Terry Fry, MD, is a professor of pediatrics, hematology and immunology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. He is the chair of the Gates Institute Advisory Board and holds the Charles C. Gates Endowed Chair in Regenerative Medicine. He arrived at Colorado in 2018 after serving as head of the Hematologic Malignancies Section in the Pediatric Oncology Branch at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), where he led efforts in cellular immunotherapy for pediatric leukemia. Prior to the NIH, Dr. Fry was chief of Blood and Marrow Transplantation at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C. His research focuses on the preclinical and clinical development of chimeric antigen receptor T cells for pediatric cancers. He serves on the Committee for Scientific Affairs for the American Society of Hematology, is vice chair for biology in the Cellular Therapy Committee of the Children’s Oncology Group, and was elected into the American Society for Clinical Investigation.

Program Name(s)

Academic Clinical Trials Program (ACT)

Project Title

A phase 1 study of anti-CD64 CAR T cells in patients with venetoclax-refractory myeloid neoplasms

Columbia University Medical Center

Dr. Teresa Palomero is a molecular and cellular biologist. She is a Professor at Columbia University in the Institute for Cancer Genetics. Her laboratory focuses on the identification of molecular alterations responsible for the development of Peripheral T-cell lymphomas, a heterogeneous group of very aggressive lymphoid malignances. Dr. Palomero has been a pioneer in the genomic analysis of Peripheral T-cell lymphoma cases and in the development of mouse models for better understanding the evolution of the disease and test novel therapeutic agents. Her extensive work on hematologic malignancies has led to the identification of key genomic alterations in leukemia and lymphoma including some currently used for molecular diagnosis.

Dr. Palomero scientific work has been published in top tier scientific journals including Nature Genetics, Nature Medicine and Cancer Cell, among others.

Program Name(s)

Discovery

Project Title

Targeting Microenvironment Determinants in Peripheral T-cell Lymphoma

Medical College of Wisconsin

Siegfried Janz, MD, DSc, Professor and William G. Schuett, Jr., Multiple Myeloma Endowed Chair directs translational myeloma research at the Division of Hematology, Oncology & Bone Marrow Transplantation, Department of Medicine, Medical College of Wisconsin Milwaukee. After obtaining his medical degree and board certification in Clinical Immunology from Leipzig University Medical School, Germany, he received advanced training in genetic and biological pathways of myeloma development at the National Cancer Institute, NIH, Bethesda, Maryland. In 2018 he relocated his laboratory to Milwaukee, where he works in close association with his clinical colleagues to enhance our understanding of the natural history of myeloma and improve myeloma treatment and outcomes. His ongoing efforts concentrate on the design and testing of novel immunotherapies that rely on patient-derived T lymphocytes to seek out and kill myeloma.

Program Name(s)

Translational Research Program

Project Title

Improving outcomes of multiple myeloma using TGF-beta resistant BCMA-targeted CAR T cells

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

Hayden Bell is a research fellow in Dr. Andrew Lane’s lab at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and a research fellow at Harvard Medical School. He is focusing on the application of novel research techniques to discover cures for blood cancers. In his PhD research, he identified novel drug combinations for the treatment of high-risk and relapsed acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). He also developed a cutting-edge pipeline allowing large-scale drug screening of primary leukemias using machine learning which is helping other researchers in the battle against leukemias. Now, Hayden is applying his leukemia biology expertise to other high-risk blood cancers including acute myeloid leukemia (AML). He is specifically focused upon sex-biased drivers and dependencies in myeloid disease, and how these might afford new opportunities for novel treatments.

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

Project Title

How does loss of chromosome Y perturb blood cell biology and create therapeutic vulnerabilities in acute myeloid leukemia?

Stanford University

Dr. Kathleen Sakamoto is Professor of Pediatrics at Stanford University School of Medicine. She has been studying the causes of AML and developing new therapies for the past 30 years. Her research funded by the LLS currently focuses on repurposing a drug used to treat tapeworms, niclosamide, for children with relapsed/refractory AML. Niclosamide is an FDA approved drug and is well tolerated in children. Dr. Sakamoto’s research has resulted in a Phase I clinical trial that will study toxicity, response in AML cells, and drug levels. She is also studying mechanisms of resistance of AML cells to niclosamide to look for drugs that will act synergistically for future clinical trials. Her goal is to take discoveries in the laboratory and translate them to the clinics to improve the overall survival and quality of life in children with AML.

Program Name(s)

Translational Research Program

Project Title

Niclosamide for the treatment of relapsed pediatric acute myeloid leukemia

Niclosamide for the Treatment of Relapsed/Refractory Pediatric Acute Myeloid Leukemia

Albert Einstein College of Medicine

Dr. Konopleva is a Director of the Acute Leukemia Program and a Co-Director of the Translational Blood Cancer Institute at Einstein/Montefiore Cancer Center, NY. The PI is a physician-scientist with an active clinical practice where she treats MDS/AML patients on a routine basis outpatient and inpatient. She directs laboratory studying at understanding the pathogenesis and chemoresistance of AML and MDS stem/progenitor cells, with focus on metabolic and apoptosis regulators. Dr. Konopleva has joined Montefiore-Einstein in summer 2022 after long successful career as a physician-scientist at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. She has brought multiple targeted agents from pre-clinical investigations into clinical trials, most notable BCL-2 inhibitor Venetoclax which in combination with low-intensity therapies has become a standard of care for older AML patients unfit for intensive chemotherapy and is being studied in high-risk MDS.

Program Name(s)

Discovery

Project Title

Targeting metabolic reprogramming in MDS and AML stem/progenitor cells

Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis

Neha Mehta-Shah, MD, MSCI is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Washington University in St. Louis where she specializes in peripheral and cutaneous T-cell lymphomas. She completed her undergraduate and medical school at Northwestern University and then completed residency at New York Presbyterian-Weill Cornell Medical Center. She was the chief resident at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center where she subsequently completed fellowship and chief fellowship in medical hematology/oncology in 2016. After joining the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis, she has developed a nationally recognized T-cell lymphoma program and completed a Master's of Science in Clinical Investigation. Having a passion for T-cell lymphoma research since medical school, she has been recognized with multiple awards from ASH, the Lymphoma Research Foundation, the T-cell Leukemia Lymphoma Society, the Alliance as well as a Paul Calabresi K12 Award. She leads multiple trials in T-cell lymphoma nationally including the first US Intergroup Study in untreated peripheral T-cell lymphomas, A0501902.

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

Project Title

Predictors of response to therapy in A051902, a US Intergroup study of duvelisib+CHO(E)P vs CC-486+CHO(E)P vs CHO(E)P in peripheral T-cell lymphoma

Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

Dr. Brody is Director of the Lymphoma Immunotherapy Program at Mount Sinai and a member of the Depart of Immunology. He has developed a robust clinical program and a translational Cancer Immunotherapy Lab which investigates basic and applied tumor immunology to develop novel therapies for lymphomas and CLL with results published in top-tier journals including Nature Medicine and Cancer Discovery.  Dr. Brody has pioneered a therapeutic vaccine approach—in situ vaccination—that induces anti-tumor immunity and regression of tumors throughout the body with clinical results published primarily for Follicular Lymphoma. Recently, his group discovered a novel approach ‘potentiating bystander killnig’ to improve immunotherapies by preventing a common escape mechanism that tumors use to evade CAR-T and bispecific antibody therapies.

Dr. Brody’s research receives funding from numerous grantors e.g. the NIH, Cancer Research Institute, Damon Runyon Foundation, and the Lymphoma Research Foundation.

Program Name(s)

Research Accelerator for Follicular Lymphoma

Project Title

Understanding and targeting rare Ag–(CD19/CD20–) Follicular Lymphoma cells to prevent post-immunotherapy antigen escape

Moffitt Cancer Center

Eric Padron, MD is an Associate Member and Scientific Director of the Department of Hematology at Moffitt Cancer Center (MCC). He completed a hematology oncology fellowship and was recruited to MCC in 2013. Dr. Padron’s research focus has centered on studying clonal hematopoiesis (CH) and chronic myeloid neoplasms across the translational research spectrum. Importantly, he has published seminal work establishing key biologic features, novel treatments, and clinical trials in CMML. Further, Dr. Padron is an R37 MERIT awardee from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) for his work in chronic myelomonocytic leukemia and has published more than 175 peer reviewed articles describing advances in myeloid malignancies and hematologic conditions, including CH. Dr. Padron is among the few physician-scientists with experience both in leading multi-institution trials and a successful NCI funded laboratory making him uniquely suited to lead this proposal.

Program Name(s)

CMML Initiative

Project Title

Advancing the therapeutic landscape for Chronic Myelomonocytic Leukemia (CMML)

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

TAP Partner

Ryvu Therapeutics is a clinical-stage drug discovery and development company focusing on novel small molecule therapies that address emerging targets in oncology using a proprietary discovery engine platform.

Program Name(s)

Therapy Acceleration Program

Project Title

A phase 2 study of RVU120, a novel CDK8 inhibitor, in combination with venetoclax in patients with AML