Who We Fund

University of Chicago

Dr. Stock is the Anjuli Seth Nayak Professor of Leukemia Research at the University of Chicago. She is the co-chair of the Leukemia Committee for the Alliance, the NCI National Clinical Trials Cooperative Group that leads practice-changing clinical trials in cancer. Dr. Stock's career has focused on clinical/translational research in acute leukemias, with a particular focus on acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). Her work has led to a paradigm shift in treatment of younger adults with ALL, translating preclinical insights from her laboratory studies on mechanisms of treatment resistance. She is the co-chair of the Clinical and Experimental Therapeutics Program at the University of Chicago Comprehensive Cancer Center. Dr. Stock serves on the editorial board of Blood Advances and has published more than 250 peer-reviewed manuscripts. She was recently elected to a 4-year term as the Councilor for the American Society of Hematology.

Program Name(s)

Academic Clinical Trials Program (ACT)

Project Title

A phase 1b/2 study targeting apoptotic and signaling pathways in T-acute lymphoblastic leukemia

Emory University

I am a cancer biologist and Associate Professor in the Department of Hematology and Medical Oncology at the Winship Cancer Institute, Emory University School of Medicine. I am a recipient of the Lexie Clayton Impact Award from The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. My research focus includes understanding how metabolic states regulate specific cancer hallmarks such as the evasion of cell death; proliferation and growth; and invasion and metastasis to identify targetable metabolic vulnerabilities. We have an interest in investigating how mitochondrial metabolism impacts multiple myeloma therapy efficacy and more recently are examining how the bone marrow niche is regulated by neural signaling. My research lab comprised of talented scientist trainees, who in collaboration with the Winship team of multiple myeloma physicians and scientists are endeavoring to ask provocative and innovative questions for curing multiple myeloma.

Program Name(s)

Translational Research Program

Project Title

Deciphering the metabolic basis for t(11;14) multiple myeloma venetoclax sensitivity

Investigating anti-neoplastic effects of beta blockers in multiple myeloma

Yale

Dr. Manyi Wei gained his B.S. degree at China Pharmaceutical University in Nanjing. Subsequently, he completed his Ph.D. training in Cell Biology at the Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. During his Ph.D. research, Dr. Wei focused on the regulatory role of long non-coding RNA in gene expression and its impact on neuronal function. Dr. Wei has always nurtured a particular interest in understanding and developing novel treatment for leukemia. After his Ph.D. training, Dr. Wei joined the laboratory of Dr. Stephanie Halene at Yale Cancer Center and Yale University School of Medicine. He immediately began exciting work on RNA modifications and their functions in the initiation and progression of acute myeloid leukemia and myelodysplastic syndromes and importantly on novel therapeutic approaches exploiting cell intrinsic and extrinsic effects of targeted inhibitors of RNA methylation. His goal is to contribute to the cure of leukemia.

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

Project Title

Harnessing METTL3 inhibition in acute megakaryoblastic leukemia driven by the t(1;22) fusion involving a member of the m6A writer complex

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

Dr. Julia Paczkowska completed her master’s degree in pharmacy at Poznan University of Medical Science, Poland. Thereafter, she obtained her PhD in medical sciences from the Institute of Human Genetics, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poznan, with a thesis focusing on deregulated transcription factors and microRNAs in the pathogenesis of classic Hodgkin lymphoma. After obtaining her degree, she began her post-doctoral studies in the laboratory of Dr. Margaret Shipp at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. Dr. Paczkowska’s postdoctoral research focuses on the immunobiology of classic Hodgkin lymphoma and related B-cell malignancies.

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

Project Title

Characterization and Targeting of Tumor-Associated Monocytes/ Macrophages that Limit the Efficacy of PD-1 Blockade in Lymphoma

Monash University

Professor Jake Shortt is a clinician scientist who is co-appointed by Monash Health as Director of Clinical Haematology and by Monash University as the Head of Haematology Research at the School of Clinical Sciences. Monash Health provides lymphoma services to the largest Australian healthcare network in the Australian state of Victoria. He is also an Honorary Clinical Professor at the Sir Peter MacCallum Department of Oncology, University of Melbourne.

Professor Shortt is group leader of the 'Blood Cancer Therapeutics Laboratory' at Monash, seeking to discover and translate new lymphoma treatments to the clinic. As a clinician scientist his research covers the full translational spectrum from scientific discovery to advanced clinical trials and registry initiatives. For more than a decade his research has focussed on poor-risk lymphoid cancers, particularly those hallmarked by activation of a gene called 'MYC' which features in some of the most aggressive lymphomas.

Program Name(s)

Translational Research Program

Exploiting escape from Y-inactivation as a synthetic dependency in MYC-driven lymphoma

University of California, Los Angeles

Yue Wang, PhD, is a postdoctoral researcher at UCLA with extensive expertise in developmental and stem cell biology. He earned his PhD in Regenerative Medicine from the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, where he conducted groundbreaking research on the regulatory mechanisms of trophoblast lineage differentiation. Dr. Wang also developed a stem-cell based organoid model to study Zika virus effects on human placenta. At UCLA, he works with Dr. Hanna Mikkola and uses single cell technologies to understand how Trisomy 21 affects human B cell development and transformation to aggressive form of B-cell Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia in children with Down Syndrome. His work aims to identify cellular origins and molecular mechanisms driving this unique type of leukemia, offering potential insights for safer and more effective therapies.

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

Project Title

Unraveling the Cellular and Molecular Origins of B-cell Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia in Down syndrome

The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center

Dr. Robert Orlowski, the Principal Investigator of this proposal, serves as the Florence Maude Thomas Cancer Research Professor and Director of the Myeloma Section at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, and is the Deputy Chair of the Department of Lymphoma & Myeloma. Also, Dr. Orlowski serves as the Chair of the SWOG Barlogie/Salmon Myeloma Committee, which is part of the National Clinical Trials Network that conducts studies to advance novel therapies for myeloma, and to expand our understanding of its biology. In the laboratory arena, Dr. Orlowski is a physician scientist whose focus has been on bench-to-bedside research that develops and validates novel therapies to improve patient outcomes, and focuses on drug resistance mechanisms that may serve as predictive biomarkers for response. His past work has included leading roles in the development of the proteasome inhibitors bortezomib and carfilzomib, as well as the monoclonal antibodies daratumumab and elotuzumab.

Program Name(s)

Specialized Center of Research Program

Translational Research Program

Project Title

SCOR in High-Risk Plasma Cell Dyscrasias

Targeting HSP70 to Immune Effector Cells to Overcome the Immune Suppressive Myeloma Microenvironment

Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania

The molecular mechanisms of cell proliferation and the field of Ubiquitin Proteasome System (UPS) have always been our main area of interest and fascination. We have the expertise, training and motivation necessary to study several different aspects of this incredibly broad field. Specifically, the training in mechanistic science, including molecular biology, biochemistry, cell/animal biology, has laid the groundwork to understand how ubiquitin ligases complexes monitor the molecular mechanisms in normal and malignant hematopoiesis. Our work has identified and studied multiple key factors regulating cellular pathways, such as DNA-damage checkpoints, cell cycle, circadian clock, Toll-like-Receptor and NF-κB activation, as documented in ours publications. In addition, we have successfully collaborated with several scientists, and contributed to peer-reviewed publications from each of these projects.

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

Project Title

Relevance of ubiquitin dependent proteolysis in diffuse large B-cell lymphoma

Weill Cornell Medicine

Ramon Massoni-Badosa, PhD is a graduate of Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona in 2023, and his PhD focused on applying single-cell genomics technologies to benchmark the effect of sample preservation in single-cell RNA-seq data (Massoni-Badosa R. Genome Biol 2020), create a single-cell-driven atlas of cell types in human tonsils (Massoni-Badosa R., Immunity in press), and track the clonal evolution of CLL to Richter's syndrome (Nadeu,* Royo,* Massoni-Badosa*, Playa-Albinyana*, Garcia-Torre* Nat Med 2022). As highlighted in these three publications, he has gained extensive experience in large-scale single-cell multi-omics projects, as well as in combining computational and biological knowledge to gain biological and clinical insights. During his postdoc in the ten Hacken and Landau labs, Ramon will leverage his expertise to improve the mechanistic understanding of Richter’s syndrome, with the ultimate goal of identifying new targets to treat this incurable disease.

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

Project Title

Uncovering MGA-driven epigenetic reprogramming in Richter's syndrome

Rutgers University

A PharmD by training, I then obtained my PhD guided by Dr. Manuel Serrano at the CNIO studying Sirt1 role in metabolism and cancer, which led to 4 first-author and 1 corresponding papers, plus 11 co authorships. Next, I joined the Ferrando Lab at Columbia University where I published two seminal papers identifying a NOTCH1-driven Myc enhancer critical for T-cell development and leukemia, and dissecting the role of cancer metabolism in the resistance to anti-NOTCH1 therapy. I started my independent career at Rutgers in July 2017. In these 4 years, I have established a highly successful and productive laboratory, as reflected by the multiple funding sources obtained (including R01, ACS or AACR grants, among others), as well as by the publication of 3 corresponding author studies: a Blood Cancer Discovery paper identifying an enhancer of PTEN in leukemia; a Leukemia paper describing the antileukemic effects of SHMT inhibition; and a Blood paper describing the therapeutic effects of mitochondrial uncoupling in T-ALL.

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

Project Title

Therapeutic exploitation of novel mouse models and metabolic interventions in leukemia

University of British Columbia

Dr. Kirk Schultz is a Professor at the University of British Columbia, BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute, and an elected fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences. Dr. Schultz is a Pediatric Hematologist/Oncologist focused on new therapies and rejection in Blood and Marrow Transplantation (BMT) and immune therapy of blood cancers. Dr. Schultz is a past recipient of the CIHR/Wyeth Clinical Research Chair in Transplantation, past chair of the Pediatric BMT Consortium the largest children’s BMT clinical trials group world-wide, and president-elect of Cell Therapy and Transplantation Canada (CTTC), the national group for Canadian cell therapy and BMT. Dr. Schultz was the co-chair of the 2020 NIH cGvHD Consensus meeting and past chair of the Biomarkers working group for the previous 2 Consensus meetings (2004 & 2014). Dr. Schultz was the Team leader for the pediatric Applied Biomarkers in Late Effects (ABLE) Team grant (2011 – 2016; $4.3M Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) funded). Dr. Schultz has 219 publications and 2 CIHR Grants and other smaller funding.

Program Name(s)

Translational Research Program

Project Title

A Polyomic Approach to Chronic Graft-versus-Host Disease (cGvHD) Biomarkers in Adults

Baylor College of Medicine

My professional goal is to improve outcomes for children with cancer and blood disorders. I am Professor of Pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine and Co-Director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Lymphoma and Histiocytosis Programs. My research group focuses on research efforts to develop and test improved therapeutic strategies for children with histiocytic disorders, lymphoproliferative disorders and lymphomas. Our research in Langerhans cell histiocytosis (LCH) has contributed to redefinition of the disease as a myeloproliferative neoplasia.

I am also co-founder of the North American Consortium for Histiocytosis Research (NACHO) that now includes over 60 institutions. With support from the LLS Translational Research Program, we are moving discoveries beyond the bench to clinical trials. NACHO-COBI is the first prospective trial testing MAPK pathway inhibition in children with LCH and related disorders that is now open in the NACHO network. We hope that results from this trial and correlative biology studies will improve survival and quality of life for patients with LCH

Program Name(s)

Translational Research Program

Project Title

Testing targeted therapy in LCH