Newsletter May 2012 - European Hematology Association

EHA Research Fellowships & José Carreras Foundation
EHA Young Investigator Fellowship Award
EHA is keen to promote and support junior investigators in their career development by providing grant funds.
This year eight Awards were presented at the EHA Annual Congress in Amsterdam to promising young investigators.
> The 2013 call for applications for EHA Research Fellowships
will be open from early November. We invite all basic and
clini cal researchers to submit their research proposal for this
highly competitive program. Applications in the fields of malignant
and non-malignant hematological diseases are welcome.
Dr Ana Cvejic from the University of
Cam bridge/ Wellcome Trust Sanger
Institute is the Winner of the EHA José
Carreras Young Investigator Fellowship
Award 2012
“The José Carreras Foundation-EHA Young
Investigator Fellowship will allow me to further strengthen my
position as an independent scientist in the field of functional
genomics of normal haemato poiesis. In addition, this Fellowship
will equip me with the project management and team leadership
experience necessary to become an independent scientist,
heading a program of research dedicated to understanding the
mechanisms by which inherited sequence variations affect
normal haematopoiesis and contribute to disease.”
14 > EHA Newsletter November 2012
The winners of the EHA Research Fellowships are: Dr Kim De
Keermaecker, Dr Stefan Matthias Gröschel, Dr Edwin David
Hawkins and Dr Monika Sylwia Kowalczyk.
“I am Kim De Keersmaecker, a staff
scientist working at the VIB Center for the
Biology of Disease at KU Leuven Belgium. I
ob tained an EHA Research Fellowship to
support my work on the role of ribosome
defects in acute lymphoblastic leukemia.
We recently discovered somatically
acquired mutations in the ribosomal proteins RPL5 and RPL10 in
13% of patients with T-ALL. With my EHA Research Fellowship, I
want to further delineate the spectrum and frequency of acquired
ribosome mutations in acute leukemia. Moreover, I want to study
the cellular consequences of ribosomal protein mutations in
hematopoietic cell models, which should allow us to better
understand how such mutations promote leukemia development.
Finally, I will investigate how mutations in the ribosomal protein
RPL10 affect hematopoiesis and hematopoietic tumor
development in vivo in a dedicated mouse model. This research
may result in therapeutically relevant results, since understanding
of the oncogenic mechanisms of ribosome defects in
cancer cells could identify potential targets for therapy for
patients with ribosome defective leukemias. Moreover, the mouse
model we will establish may turn out to be very useful for testing
of candidate drugs for ribosome defective leukemias. It was via
my mentor and through attending the annual EHA conferences
that I became aware of the EHA Research Fellowship program. I
am very grateful for this fellowship since it is welcome recognition
of our work and gives more visibility to our discovery of ribosome
mutations in T-ALL. The fellowship money also directly supports
further continuation of our research on this topic and will facilitate
acquisition of additional funding, allowing the establish ment
of a small research team focused on exploring the role of
ribosome defects in leukemia and cancer in general.”
“My name is Stefan Gröschel and I am
honoured to be one of the selected
Fellowship recipients. Having previously
worked as an MD and research fellow at
the Dept. of Hematology of the University
Hospital of Ulm (Head: Professor Döhner) I
moved to Rotterdam in July 2011 to embark
on my research project titled “Deregulation of EVI1 in myeloid
malignancies with inv(3)/t(3;3)” under the lead of Professor Ruud
Delwel at the Erasmus University Medical Center. In this project
we aim to understand the genetic events leading to aberrant
activation of the proto-oncogene EVI1 being the molecular
characteristic of an aggressive type of acute myeloid leukemia
with chromosome 3q rearrangements. We plan to achieve this in
a stepwise approach by first identifying regulatory genomic
regions critical for the transcriptional control of the EVI1. To this
end, we have studied the genomic environment of EVI1 using
RNA-seq, target locus capture and chromosome confirmation
capture (4C) followed by next-generation sequencing. In the
following two years, our next main goals are the functional
validation of candidate regions and the attempt to characterize
the transcription factor complex involved in activation of the EVI1
locus in myeloid malignancies with inv(3)/t(3;3). With the two-year
funding from the EHA Research Fellowship I have the unique
opportunity to realize this interesting and challenging program.
Since the EHA Fellowship is a well-recognized grant in
Hematology, suited to junior clinicians and researchers at the
beginning of their scientific career, I was encouraged to apply for
the program by my mentor as well as previous colleagues who
have received this distinguished award. The fellowship will be of
great value and motivation to complete my objectives in the lab
and will help open doors to apply for future projects funded from
other institutional and public grants.”
“My name is Edwin Hawkins originally
from the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre,
Melbourne, Australia. Through the EHA
Young Investigator Fellowship I have
relocated to Imperial College London,
United Kingdom to conduct research on my
project “In vivo imaging of Notch-1 driven
T-ALL interaction with the bone marrow microenvironment”. The
focus of this project is to address the cellular mechanisms that
cause relapse of T cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (T-ALL).
Although T-ALL patients initially respond well to treatment, longterm
prognosis is poor due to relapsed disease, which is often
refractory to initial therapies. Notably, the failure to eliminate
minimal residual disease in the bone marrow identifies patients
at a very high risk of disease relapse.The interaction of leukaemia
with the bone marrow microenvironment has gained increasing
attention as specific niches may be able to provide mechanisms of
drug resistance, quiescence, and self-renewal in the same way
that has been demonstrated for haematopoietic stem cells. Using
novel in vivo time-lapse imaging, we will examine the relationship
between T-ALL and the microenvironment at various disease
stages with a particular focus on cells responsible for disease
relapse. I learnt about the EHA young investigator fellowship
through colleagues in the hematology field and via circulated
newsletters as a result of my EHA membership. The vision of the
EHA to provide funding that promotes international relocation
within Europe was my main reason for applying to the scheme.
The financial support provided by the EHA young investigator
fellowship will enable me to focus on my research and help me
achieve my overall goal, which is to increase the quality of life of
cancer patients. Additionally, the support provided by the EHA
through scientific meetings and educational programs has
enabled me to form strong networks within Europe. I hope to use
this as a platform to increase inter-institutional scientific
collaborations, and in turn, increase research output. I believe
that the interaction of multiple high quality research groups,
united by common goal to cure cancer, is essential for our
chances of winning this battle.”
“My name is Monika S. Kowalczyk and I
am one of this year’s winners of The EHA
Research Fellowship. I have recently joined
the Computational Biology Laboratory lead
by Dr Aviv Regev at The Broad Institute of
MIT and Harvard (Cambridge, USA) and am
embarking on a large-scale study to
decipher the chromatin regulatory circuits of mammalian hemato
poiesis in order to understand and treat leukemia. Such a
systems biology approach will integrate gene expression profiling
with epigenomics data and systematic functional screens by RNAi
and has huge potential to reveal novel disease mechanisms and
discover new targets for drug application. Current technologies
give us fantastic opportunities to begin unravelling how biological
decisions are made in health and disease from a systemic point of
view. With the advancements in tools and knowledge, a detailed
understanding of mammalian cell circuits is achievable and the
time is right for me to tackle the circuits of human hemato poiesis.
Creating a complete catalog of cell circuitry within human
hematopoiesis will pave the way to the manipulation and
reprograming of these circuits and ultimately have a huge impact
on our ability to understand and treat diseases like leukemia.
I received a MD degree in Poland, and a DPhil in molecular
hematology from the University of Oxford (UK). My DPhil research
has provided me with important expertise at studying the
interface between cell differentiation and regulatory mechanisms
and my medical training underlies my passion to apply these in a
translational context. This EHA award allowed me to enter one of
the finest academic communities (MIT and Harvard) and
importantly funds the research which I will carry out. This unique
opportunity will give me knowledge, skills and competence to
pursue my scientific interests independently as a group leader.”
Dr Lucia Stefanini is this year’s recipient of the EHA-ISTH Joint
Fellowship. The award of EUR 72,000 over two years is intended
to support the study of the physiology of bleeding,
coagulation or thrombosis. Dr Stefanini’s proposal, Fine-tuning
EHA Newsletter November 2012 > 15