Ajeet Gajra, MD, FACP, Joins Hematology-Oncology Associates of CNY
Ajeet Gajra, MD, FACP, a board-certified medical oncologist and hematologist, has joined Hematology-Oncology Associates of CNY (HOA). In addition to extensive cancer-research experience, Gajra also is board-certified in hospice and palliative care.
His cancer research includes serving as a principal investigator for more than 40 clinical trials, including pharmaceutical-sponsored, US cooperative group, and investigator-initiated studies. In addition, he served as Medical Director for Oncology at ICON research, a global clinical research organization. There he led design, oversight, clinical development, and regulatory interactions for Phase I-IV trials in oncology and hematology, including immuno-oncology and CAR T-cell therapy.
"Adding Gajra's expertise to our team increases our ability to expand our therapeutic research efforts for patients in Central New York," said Maryann Roefaro, HOA's Chief Executive Officer. "By providing convenient, world-class care in our community, patients can receive treatments close to their loved ones without added costs of time and travel."
Having most recently served as the Chief Medical Officer at Cardinal Health, Gajra was previously Associate Director of the Upstate Cancer Center, where he also served as Medical Director. In addition to providing clinical care to patients with all types of cancers and blood disorders, Gajra has served on the medical faculty at SUNY Upstate Medical University as Professor of Medicine and Program Director for the Hematology/Oncology Fellowship.
Receiving his MBBS and MD (Internal Medicine) from Delhi University in India, Gajra completed his residency at SUNY Upstate Medical University, where he also completed his fellowship in medical oncology and hematology.
A member of Alpha Omega Alpha honor society, Gajra has received numerous patient-care quality awards, including the Anita Award from Hospice of CNY. He also was awarded fellowship by American College of Physicians in 2011 and served on the lung cancer guidelines committee of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO).
ACCC Names New President: David R. Penberthy, MD, MBA
David R. Penberthy, MD, MBA, was named President of the Association of Community Cancer Centers (ACCC) at the association's 48th Annual Meeting and Cancer Center Business Summit. Oncology professionals from around the nation gathered at the event to discuss the convergence of business, policy, and technology in cancer care. Addressing in-person and virtual meeting attendees, Penberthy detailed the goals for his 2022-2023 tenure, announcing his President's Theme, "Leveraging Technology to Transform Cancer Care Delivery and the Patient Experience," and highlighting the objectives within:
* equitably leverage data and digital health tools to identify ways to reduce health disparities;
* identify strategies to use technology to help mitigate workforce shortages and improve efficiency of care;
* advocate for equitable access to technology innovations and adequate reimbursement for their application in cancer care delivery; and
* convene technology-driven change makers to share solutions and envision the future state of oncology driven by the patient experience.
For the next year, Penberthy will focus the organization's efforts on identifying technology-driven solutions, like artificial intelligence and patient wearables, to free up time for providers to focus more on patients, alleviate workforce shortages, and improve patient access by expanding telehealth in cancer care delivery.
"The science of oncology is exploding and keeping up with all the information is a daunting task," said Penberthy. "As oncology providers, we are exceptional at engaging with patients, and an opportunity exists to use technology, like AI-driven practice support tools and patient wearable devices, to free up our time so we are better able to focus on critical issues, such as shared medical decision-making, improving care to underserved and marginalized patients, increasing clinical trial participation and, most importantly, delivering person-centered care."
Penberthy highlighted the opportunity to expand the role of health technologies in clinical trial participation, enhance the delivery of person-centered care, and improve care to underserved populations. As part of this theme, ACCC will host small-group virtual tech talks and other outreach to members to determine how they develop technology-driven solutions and then serve as a conduit to collect and disseminate this information through its robust portfolio of educational resources.
Penberthy is Medical Director of Radiation Oncology at Bon Secours, Southside Regional Medical Center (SRMC) in Petersburg, Va. He has also served as Cancer Committee Chairman at SRMC, where he led the oncology program through two American College of Surgeons Commission on Cancer accreditation surveys, resulting in cancer program accreditation, each time earning an Outstanding Achievement Award. His career in medicine began with a surgical internship at Bethesda Naval Hospital and then service as a U.S. Navy Flight Surgeon with Fighter Squadron 101.
Grants to Support Transformative Cancer Research
Two grants for research that could transform cancer detection and treatment have been awarded by the AACR-MPM Oncology Charitable Foundation Transformative Cancer Research Grants Program, an innovative partnership between the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) and the UBS Oncology Impact Fund (OIF 1).
The program provides generous funds to early- and mid-career investigators to pursue creative, paradigm-shifting research that will advance the understanding of cancer and potentially transform future clinical practice. These grants are part of OIF 1's impact program, which provides support for next-generation basic science research, as well as for expanding access to cancer care in the developing world. OIF 1 donates a percentage of the fund manager's profits to the impact program, as well as royalties on approved drugs from OIF 1 startup portfolio companies.
"We are thrilled to announce this year's Transformative Cancer Research Grant recipients," said Margaret Foti, PhD, MD (hc), Chief Executive Officer of the AACR. "These projects tackle two difficult challenges in cancer research: early detection of pancreatic cancer and evaluation of the therapeutic potential of targeting so-called 'undruggable' targets in myelodysplastic syndromes and other cancers. We are proud to continue our partnership with MPM and OIF in support of scientists whose bold ideas and innovative approaches have the potential to lead to significant breakthroughs for patients." The two grants include the following research opportunities.
Iok In Christine Chio, PhD, Assistant Professor of Genetics and Development at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, proposes to apply chemical proteomic tools to identify oxidation products that will discriminate between pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma and benign disease such as pancreatitis. These experiments will establish a discovery pipeline for the exploration of new diagnostics and contribute to the development of early detection and therapeutic strategies in the clinic.
"The AACR-MPM Oncology Charitable Foundation Transformative Cancer Research Grant will catapult our efforts to address an important knowledge gap in cancer redox biology and to develop effective, redox-based early detection strategies for pancreatic cancer and other malignancies," said Chio.
Eirini P. Papapetrou, MD, PhD, Associate Professor of Oncological Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, will investigate G[alpha]s as a therapeutic target and evaluate therapeutic interventions that inhibit signaling downstream of its long form (G[alpha]s-L) assessed by in vitro and in vivo functional assays using induced pluripotent stem cell model and primary myelodysplastic syndrome cells.
"I am honored and grateful to receive this award, which will enable my laboratory to embark on a new and exciting direction in cancer biology of evaluating a new therapeutic target for cancers with splicing factor mutations," said Papapetrou.
Each project will receive $400,000 over a 2-year period. In this program, proposed research must represent a highly innovative approach to a major problem or challenge in cancer research that might not otherwise be funded through conventional channels. The projects can be focused on any area of basic, translational, or clinical research.
New Collaborations Garner Funding From Starr Cancer Consortium
Two multi-institutional teams led by Weill Cornell Medicine scientists have been awarded grant support from the Starr Cancer Consortium. Both grants will fund work applying new technologies to develop more detailed knowledge of tumor biology, with one team focusing on Hodgkin lymphoma and the other on the purity of tumor samples on pathology slides.
The Starr Cancer Consortium, established in 2006, is a collaboration among five leading research institutions: The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, The Rockefeller University, and Weill Cornell Medicine.
Each year, investigators from these institutions propose projects to improve the prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and fundamental understanding of cancer. A review board of scientists from outside the consortium selects proposals to fund, emphasizing ambitious collaborative projects with the potential to transform the understanding and treatment of cancer. This year's winners include projects led by Lisa Giulino Roth, MD, and Iman Hajirasouliha, PhD, of Weill Cornell Medicine.
Lisa Giulino Roth, MD, is Director of Pediatric Oncology, Associate Professor of Pediatrics, and Associate Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. Her project will focus on defining the evolution and tumor microenvironment interactions of classic Hodgkin lymphoma through single-cell multi-omics and genetically engineered mouse models
Current treatments for classic Hodgkin lymphoma often cause long-term side effects, but a lack of good laboratory models for the disease has constrained efforts to develop better therapies. One major problem is that a small minority of cells in the Hodgkin tumor microenvironment drive the disease, and the activities of these cells are hard to detect with bulk gene sequencing methods. Roth's team previously developed novel cell-sorting techniques to isolate the tumor-driving cells, analyzing their unique genomes and gene expression profiles. That work revealed a complex tumor, with extensive interactions between the Hodgkin Reed-Sternberg cells and non-malignant cells in the tumor microenvironment.
With the new grant, the researchers now plan to trace the lineages of these different cell types to determine how they arose within the tumor and build new mouse models of the disease. The work will rely heavily on new gene sequencing and cellular profiling techniques to characterize the tumor microenvironment in unprecedented detail. Co-principal investigators on the project include Anna (Seung Ha) Nam, MD, from Weill Cornell Medicine and Mikhail Roshal, MD, from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
Iman Hajirasouliha, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Physiology and Biophysics, as well as Assistant Professor of Computational Genomics in Computational Biomedicine, at the HRH Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud Institute for Computational Biomedicine. His project highlights weakly-supervised tumor purity prediction from H&E-stained slides.
Efforts to sequence cancer genomes in recent years have yielded a trove of data for basic research and sequencing clinical samples can also provide important prognostic information for patients. In both clinical and research sequencing, the usefulness of the data depends on the purity of the tumor tissue sample. If there are many non-tumor cells contaminating the sample, their DNA sequences can skew the results, concealing important mutations involved in tumor development. Moreover, tumor purity is associated with different outcomes in certain cancer types.
Hajirasouliha's team will use their grant to mine digital pathology slides and sequencing data from the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) program and the Caryl and Englander Institute for Precision Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine to develop and test algorithms for determining tumor purity on a microscope slide. The investigators will use rigorous benchmarks to compare their results to previous models, pathology scores and molecular analyses, with a focus on identifying subsections of samples that contain the purest populations of tumor cells. Once trained and validated, the algorithm could be used to improve sequencing on future samples.
Victoria Popic, PhD, from The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard is the co-principal investigator.
"We're proud of these Weill Cornell Medicine investigators, whose efforts stood out among a field of some of the top cancer scientists in the world in the Starr Foundation's annual competition," said Hugh Hemmings, MD, PhD, Senior Associate Dean for Research and Chair of the Department of Anesthesiology. He adds that "with the generous support of the foundation, these talented researchers will be able to continue advancing our understanding of cancer biology and developing new ways to treat it."
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