Who We Fund

Weill Cornell Medicine

John P. Leonard, MD, is the Richard T. Silver Distinguished Professor of Hematology and Medical Oncology and Senior Associate Dean for Innovation and Initiatives at Weill Cornell Medicine. He is Executive Vice Chairman of the Weill Department of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine and New York-Presbyterian Hospital.  Dr. Leonard’s research has been published in numerous medical journals, and he has served as a member of the editorial boards of Blood and the Journal of Clinical Oncology, leading international journals in these fields. He is Chair of the Lymphoma Committee of the Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology, a multicenter cooperative group and key component of the National Cancer Institute’s National Clinical Trials Network. Dr. Leonard’s primary research interest is in the development of novel therapeutic strategies for the treatment of lymphoma and related hematologic malignancies, and he has lectured at major international meetings on these topics. He also has studied prognostic, imaging and survivorship issues for lymphoma patients.

Program Name(s)

IMPACT

Project Title

BRIDGE (Blood cancer Research Initiative Developing Greater Engagement) with community patients

Fondazione Centro San Raffaele

Dr. Matteo Bellone obtained an M.D. degree (with honors) and was Board Certified in Allergology and Clinical Immunology at the Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy. He had a 3-year post-doctoral training at the University of Minnesota working on autoimmunity with Bianca Conti-Fine. Since the early nineties he has been investigating interactions between cancer and immune cells with discoveries leading to several clinical outputs. He is Head of the Cellular Immunology Unit at Ospedale San Raffaele (Milan, Italy), where he also practices as Clinical Immunologist. He is adjunct professor of Immunology at Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele, Milan, Associate Editor at Frontiers in Immunology and Frontiers in Oncology, and member of several boards serving scientific journals and charities. He is Secretary and Treasurer of the Network Italiano per la BioTerapia dei Tumori (NIBIT), Council Member of the European Network for Cancer Immunotherapy (ENCI), and member of the SIICA, and the AACR.

Program Name(s)

Translational Research Program

Gut microbiota modulation to prevent progression of smoldering multiple myeloma to active disease

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

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center

Dr. Urvi Shah is an Assistant Attending in the Myeloma Service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. She is board certified in Internal Medicine, Hematology and Medical Oncology and received a Master of Science degree in Clinical and Translational Cancer Research. Her research interests include modifiable risk factors (diet, metabolism, microbiome) in cancer. She completed the first pilot nutrition trial in plasma cell disorders to date (NUTRIVENTION) and has 3 other dietary trials enrolling. Dr. Shah has been supported by career development awards (National Cancer Institute [NCI] K12, International Myeloma Society and American Society of Hematology [ASH] Scholar) and research awards (ASH CRTI, ECOG ACRIN Young Investigator Translational Research, Henry Moses, Celgene Future Leaders in Hematology, NCI Early Investigator Advancement Program and Clinical Cancer Research Early Career). She has published papers in prominent journals and has been an invited speaker and chair.

Program Name(s)

Academic Clinical Trials Program (ACT)

Project Title

A Decentralized Randomized High-Fiber Dietary Trial to Improve Outcomes in Newly Diagnosed Myeloma

Houston Methodist Research Institute

I am a translational tumor immunologist. I have 30 years of experience as a well-funded and published researcher and am one of the leading investigators in the fields of tumor immunology in myeloma and other cancers. My laboratory has been working on: (1) characterizing myeloma- and tumor-specific T cells and their subsets and examining their functions, (2) identifying novel myeloma-associated antigens and better methods for immunotherapy, (3) investigating the cross-talk between the tumor microenvironment (TME) and immune system, (4) conducting clinical trials to evaluate the efficacy of immunizing patients with idiotype or dendritic cell-based vaccines, and (5) exploring immunotherapies using myeloma antigens such as DKK1. Our recent research focuses on: (a) developing novel therapeutic mAbs and CAR-T cells for cancers, (b) identifying T-cell subsets that have potent antitumor effects after adoptive transfer, and (c) identifying TME components that induce tumor drug resistance.

Program Name(s)

Translational Research Program

Project Title

Developing Novel CAR-T Cell Therapy For Hematologic Malignancies

The University of Melbourne

Dr. Lev Kats is head of the Targeted Therapeutics Laboratory at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre. He completed his PhD at Monash University and postdoctoral training at Beth Israel Deaconess Centre/Harvard Medical School. Dr. Kats has made major contributions in the areas of targeted therapies, epigenetics and hematological malignancies including through discovery of important functions of cancer promoting genes and the characterization of the molecular mechanisms of anti-leukemic drugs. His laboratory uses model systems, functional and molecular genomics approaches to develop and test new therapeutic strategies for aggressive blood cancers.

Program Name(s)

Translational Research Program

Targeting DCAF1 as a novel treatment strategy for therapy resistant multiple myeloma

Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center

Dr Dhodapkar is a physician-scientist with expertise in clinical/translational research in cancer immunology/dendritic cell (DC) biology and in immunobiology of myeloma (MM) and related diseases. Following training in immunology in the lab of Nobel Laureate (Late) Ralph Steinman, Dhodapkar lab has been focused on studies of immunobiology of myeloma and cancer immunology. His clinical practice has been focused on patients with myeloma for past 20+ years. He carried the earliest studies of adoptive human DC transfer and in vivo targeting of human DCs. His laboratory has made several seminal contributions to MM biology and cancer immunology. In terms of clinical research in MM, he has led several clinical studies, including the first clinical studies that led to the discovery of anti-myeloma effects of thalidomide (UArk98-003), first US national cooperative group studies in precursor gammopathies(S0120), AL amyloidosis(S9826) and co-led the first phase III studies (E3A06) showing successful prevention of clinical MM. He has served on several panels for clinical guidelines, including as lead for SITC clinical immunotherapy guidelines panel for myeloma. He has co-led the cancer immunology programs at Yale and Emory for the past decade. His work has been cited >34K times with h-index 87. Relevant to the current proposal, he/his group has played a major role in clinical development of T-cell engagers as well as IMiDs in MM, developed the first genetically-humanized model for myeloma and provided new insights into spatial immunology.

Program Name(s)

Academic Clinical Trials Program (ACT)

Project Title

Pilot trial of microbial targeting to prevent myeloma

University of Florida

Jonathan D. Licht, MD, is the Director of the University of Florida Health Cancer Institute, leading it to become the 72nd NCI-designated center in the country. Dr. Licht’s laboratory studies the role of abnormal function of histone methyltransferases and demethylases in malignancies such as multiple myeloma and acute lymphoblastic leukemia and recently described a new class of mutations in histones in cancer. NCI funded for nearly 35 years, Dr. Licht is also Principal Investigator of a Leukemia and Lymphoma Society (LLS) Specialized Center of Research, now in its 17th year of funding. He is the founding Editor- in-Chief of Blood Neoplasia, a new journal of the American Society of Hematology, and serves on the editorial boards of Cancer Research, Oncogene and Clinical Cancer Research. Dr. Licht was the first chair of the AACR Taskforce on Hematological Malignancies of and currently is Chair of the Medical/Scientific Board of the LLS. Dr. Licht has published more than 230 articles, reviews and book chapters and has mentored over 40 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows and 20 faculty members.

Program Name(s)

Specialized Center of Research Program

Project Title

Epigenetic Mechanisms and Targeting in Hematological Malignancy

Maine Medical Center

Dr. Michaela Reagan is a Faculty Scientist II at the MaineHealth Institute for Research and an Associate Professor at Tufts University School of Medicine. She received her B.S. in general Engineering from Harvey Mudd College (2006) and Ph.D. from Tufts University in Biomedical Engineering in the field of breast cancer bone metastasis (2011). She then performed her post-doctoral research at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in the laboratory of Dr. Irene Ghobrial (2011-2015). Dr. Reagan is a member of the Finance Committee of the American Society of Bone and Mineral Research (ASBMR) and is the past chair of the ASBMR’s Women’s Committee. Since 2015, she has led innovative, transdisciplinary, basic and translational research in the Reagan Laboratory at MaineHealth with the goal of identifying cancer vulnerabilities that can lead to new treatments or cures for multiple myeloma (MM) patients. Her unique research is focused on the interactions between obesity, adipocytes and myeloma cells.

Program Name(s)

Career Development Program

Project Title

Multiple Myeloma Support from the Microenvironment: Bone Marrow Adipocytes and the Fatty Acid Binding Proteins

Emory University

Lawrence Boise, PhD is the R. Randall Rollins Chair of Oncology and Professor in the Department of Hematology and Medical Oncology in the Emory University School of Medicine. Dr. Boise also serves as the Associate Director of Education and Training in the Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University. He received his PhD from VCU-Medicine and did his postdoctoral training at the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago. Dr. Boise took his first faculty position at the University of Miami in 1996 and rose to the rank of Professor before moving to Emory in 2009. Dr. Boise was involved in early studies to identify genes that control cell survival and cell death and has been studying these processes to better understand how to improve our treatment of cancer, particularly the plasma cell malignancy multiple myeloma. Dr. Boise serves as a Senior Editor at Molecular Cancer Research and is on the editorial board of Blood Cancer Discovery.

Program Name(s)

Discovery

Project Title

Functional dissection of heterogeneity of responses to CAR T cells using Spatiotemporal Image-guided Genomic and Cellular Analysis (SaGA) in myeloma

The University of Texas at Austin

William Matsui is a Professor of Oncology, Director of the Hematologic Malignancy Program, Associate Chair of Research, and the Deputy Director of the LiveSTRONG Cancer Institutes at the Dell Medical School and the University of Texas at Austin. He also serves as the interim Vice Dean of Research for Dell Med. Dr. Matsui's research has focused on understanding the intersection between cancer, stem cell, and developmental biology. His laboratory first identified unique populations of cancer cells with stem cell properties in multiple myeloma and found that several pathways regulating normal stem cells, including those involved in embryonic development, are abnormally activated in cancer stem cells. Importantly, these basic research studies have simultaneously been translationally relevant and served as the basis for over a dozen novel clinical trials.

Program Name(s)

Translational Research Program

Project Title

Stem cell features and Notch signaling in p53 deleted multiple myeloma

The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center

Dr. Nze is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the department of Lymphoma and Myeloma at the University of Texas, MD Anderson Cancer Center. Dr. Nze's clinical interests are in malignant hematology and oncology with a focus on Lymphoma. He is broadly interested in healthcare delivery system design, value-based healthcare research, and the health policy contexts that shape care delivery. He has been a longtime advocate for equity in health care delivery and the elements that lead to differential access and outcomes in care for vulnerable populations. He aims to combine excellence in delivering clinical oncologic care to cancer patients and investigate how we can optimally structure our healthcare system to ensure equitable cancer care for all.  

Program Name(s)

IMPACT

Project Title

Research Infrastructure to Promote Enrollment of Underserved Patients on Clinical Trials