At the June, 2016 Board of Trustees meeting, the IWMF Board approved a renewal of Dr. Steven Treon’s project on Targeting MYD88 assembly and downstream signaling in Waldenstrom’s Macroglobulinemia, along with three research proposals from the IWMF-Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS) Strategic Research Roadmap:
- Dr. M. Dhodapkar from Yale University, USA: Origins and immunotherapy of macroglobulinemia.
- Drs. Buske, Munch, Sauter from Ulm University, Germany: Characterization of endogenous CXCR4 inhibitory peptides to target WM.
- Dr. M. Spaargaren from Academic Medical Center, the Netherlands: Towards a rational targeted therapy for WM by kinome-centered loss-of-adhesion and synthetic lethality screens.
The Research Roadmap is the direct result of a conference held in May 2015 that identified four research priority areas focused on advancing our understanding of WM. Dr. Lee Greenberger, Chief Scientific Officer of the LLS, moderated the conference, and the Scientific Co-Chairs were Dr. Steven Treon of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Dr. Stephen Ansell of Mayo Clinic. You can find more information about the IWMF-LLS Strategic Research Roadmap along with a short video of Dr. Ansell explaining the Roadmap and its importance to the WM community.
The commitment of nearly $1.7M over two years towards these groundbreaking research initiatives was made possible primarily by member donations. In fact, 100% of all research donations go to research – not a single penny goes anywhere else!
IWMF President Carl Harrington said, “This is the largest single commitment to research the IWMF has ever made. And I’m proud to say that this commitment is greater than the Research spending the Lymphoma Research Foundation (USA) recently announced for 2016. With your continued support, we will keep pushing ahead on our Strategic Research Roadmap until we find a cure!”