2015 MPN CHALLENGE GRANT AWARDS

August 11, 2015

“The best thing we can do as a patient-driven organization funding our own research is to entice the best minds in science to focus on PV, ET and MF lest they get left by the wayside” says MPN Research Foundation President Barbara Van Husen. It is on that note we are proud to an nounce the award of nine research projects who will receive funding through our collaboration with the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. The goal of each project is to better understand and /or treat the MPNs through gene editing, immunotherapy, new mechanisms of action and targeting the JAK2 mutation.

The two year awards will go to:

• George M. Church, PhD – Department of Genetics, Harvard University Click to read about this project
• Camelia Iancu-Rubin, PhD and Nina Bhardwaj, MD, PhD – Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Click to read about this project
• Zhijan Qian, PhD and Wen-Shu Wu, PhD – Department of Medicine, University of Illinois at Chicago Click to read about this project
• Brady L. Stein, MD, MHS – Robert H. Lurie Cancer Center, Northwestern University Click to read about this project
• Zhaohui Ye, PhD – Department of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Click to read about this project

The winners of the two year awards will each receive up to $200,000 total for two year projects, with continued funding contingent on progress.

Finishing what they started 

Additional funding was awarded to four previous grantees for continua tion of their work pursuing an immunotherapy based on the CALR mutation, developing zebrafish models, studying the bone marrow niche and developing non-invasive imaging techniques for measuring bone marrow fibrosis. The one-year continuation awards will go to:

• Nadia Carlesso, MD, PhD – Herman B. Wells Center for Pediatric Research, Indiana University School of Medicine
• Robert Kralovics, PhD – Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences
• Katya Ravid, MD, PhD – Boston University School of Medicine
• Leonard Zon, MD – Boston Children’s Hospital

The grant review was conducted by a multi-disciplinary group overseen by the MPN Research Foundation’s Scientific Advisory Board Chair Dr. Andrew Schafer from Weil Cornell.

Partnering to keep the focus on MPNs 

This marks the third consecutive year that MPN Research Foundation has teamed up with Leukemia & Lymphoma Society to fund innovative research grants for ET, PV and MF whose combined prevalence is approximately 300,000 in the United States.
Founded in 2000, the Foundation helps patients find a way to help change their prognosis by taking part in funding research, educating themselves and others about MPNs and participating in clinical trials. To date, the Foundation has awarded over ten million dollars for MPN research.