October 2021

Xufen Yu, PhD; Aneel Aggarwal, PhD; Jian Jin, PhD; and colleagues

Science Translational Medicine. 2021 Sep 29. PMID: 34586829

Kenneth Rosenzweig, MD, has been selected as one of three recipients of the 2021 Lung Cancer Heroes® award. Dr. Rosenzweig will be recognized for making a difference in the lives of patients with lung cancer at a virtual award ceremony to be hosted by CURE® on October 28.

It is still possible to attend, at no charge, by registering here. 

Santiago Thibaud, MD, Chief Fellow, Hematology and Medical Oncology, received a Young Investigator Award for Exemplary Abstract at the International Myeloma Workshop, held in September in Vienna. Dr. Thibaud’s abstract was “Pathogenic Germline Variants in Hereditary Cancer Genes in Patients with Multiple Myeloma.”

Oliver Van Oekelen, MD, also received a Young Investigator Award for Exemplary Abstract for “Suboptimal humoral immune response to SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccination in myeloma patients is associated with anti-CD38 mAb and BCMA-targeted treatment.”

Nima Assad, MD/PhD student in the laboratory of Miriam Merad, MD, PhD, has won a Mount Sinai Trainee Innovation Idea Award for his project on spatial immune transcriptome visualization in human tumors. This award highlights research ideas that could potentially be translated into marketable products. Dr. Assad will be honored at the SINAInnovations Awards Ceremony, to be held virtually on November 8.

Gagan Sahni, MBBS, Director of Cardio- Oncology, has been awarded the status of Fellow of the International Cardio-Oncology Society. Dr. Sahni is one of just 15 cardiologists worldwide with this distinction.

As Chair and Principal Investigator of the AIDS Malignancy Consortium (AMC), Joseph Sparano, MD, oversees a $22 million grant award from the National Cancer Institute related to the activities of the consortium for the 2021-2022 grant year. The grant award, previously based at Dr. Sparano’s former institution, followed Dr. Sparano to The Tisch Cancer Institute (TCI) when he joined the Mount Sinai faculty. This newly transferred grant award confers a significant increase to TCI’s grant portfolio and will enable TCI investigators to contribute to the scientific activities of AMC.

The AMC aims to reduce the incidence, morbidity, and mortality of cancer occurring in individuals with HIV infection. It investigates new treatment and prevention interventions and studies the pathobiology of tumors in the context of clinical trials. The AMC includes a network of 42 core clinical sites in the U.S., Africa, and Latin America. Mount Sinai/TCI will be joining AMC as a domestic core site, and will also assume the role as the Statistical and Data Analysis Center under the direction of Madhu Mazumdar, MD. 

Hanna Irie, MD, PhD, Principal Investigator, and Jian Jin, PhD, Co-investigator, have been awarded a Peter T. Rowley Breast Cancer Research Projects grant from the New York State Department of Health to study a novel therapeutic for hormone-related breast cancers that are resistant to standard of care medicines.

Deborah Marshall, MD, and Jalal Ahmed, MD, PhD, have received NIH Director’s Early Independence Awards from the NIH Common Fund’s High-Risk, High-Reward Research program. The goal of Dr. Marshall’s project, Novel Functional Anatomic and Biomarker Indices of Radiation-Induced Female Sexual Toxicities in a Multi-Center Cohort, is to prevent and mitigate the effects of radiotherapy on sexual function and to improve quality of life after cancer treatment.

Dr. Ahmed’s project, Advancing CAR T Cell Therapy for Solid Tumors, aims to design novel CAR T-cell therapies informed by the study of myeloid cells that play a key role in shaping the composition of the tumor microenvironment and the response to cancer immunotherapy.

Weiva Sieh, MD, PhD, Li Shen, PhD, and Laurie Margolies, MD, were awarded R01 funding from the National Cancer Institute to study “Radiomic and genomic predictors of breast cancer risk.” This collaborative study with Laurel Habel, PhD, at Kaiser Permanente Northern California, will examine whether breast tissue features automatically extracted from digital mammograms (radiomics) and polygenic risk scores can significantly improve clinical breast cancer risk prediction models among ethnically diverse women undergoing screening with 2D mammography and 3D tomosynthesis at Kaiser and Mount Sinai.

Zeynep Gümüş, PhD, and Sacha Gnjatic, PhD, were awarded a Cancer Moonshot Initiative (CMI) R33 grant from the National Cancer Institute. The goal of their project—PRIMAVO: Interactive exploration of cancer patient precision immune monitoring data in clinical trials—is to develop a user-friendly web-based tool to enable researchers of all computational skill levels to explore CMI immune monitoring assay results visually and interactively for visualization tools in immunotherapy. 

Kavita Dharmarajan, MD, MSc, has received a Paul B. Beeson Emerging Leaders Career Development Award in Aging (K76) from the National Institute on Aging for her work on improving outcomes for older adults undergoing palliative radiation. Dr. Dharmarajan is one of only 10 recipients in the U.S. and the first radiation oncologist ever to receive this award.

Mount Sinai received a grant from the American Cancer Society to help with transportation for cancer patients through the end of 2021. 

The Tisch Cancer Institute Scholars (TCI Scholars) Program, requests proposals for pilot projects across all avenues of cancer research (basic, translational, or clinical) and disease areas. Early and mid-career researchers, non-faculty scientists, instructors, and postdocs within the Mount Sinai Health System are invited to apply. 

The Patient-Oriented Research Training and Leadership (PORTAL) program proudly recognizes Hrishikesh Srinagesh, MD, who completed the dual degree MD/Master of Clinical Research (MSCR) program in 2020. Dr. Srinagesh, now a second year Internal Medicine resident at Stanford, plans to pursue fellowship training in Hematology/Oncology with a long-term goal of conducting clinical research in bone marrow transplantation. While at Mount Sinai, Dr. Srinagesh conducted research under the mentorship of James Ferrara, MD, in graft-versus-host-disease (GVHD). His work showed that biomarker levels after one week of treatment for GVHD provided more accurate predictions for long-term survival than clinical response after four week. These findings, published in Blood Advances in 2019, earned Dr. Srinagesh a top medical student abstract award from the American Hematology Association that year. Another abstract earned him first place in the Peer Choice Poster Competition at the 2019 annual meeting of the Association for Clinical and Translational Research.

The PORTAL program fosters career development of medical students who aim to excel as physician scientist leaders in translational clinical research. Keith Sigel, MD, PhD, member of TCI’s Cancer Prevention and Control Program, is Director of the program. Janice Gabrilove, MD, Associate Director of Education and Training at TCI, is Co-director.

Samir Parekh, MBBS, and colleagues

Cancer Cell. 2021 Oct 18.

Dr. Parekh and colleagues investigated whether multiple myeloma (MM) patients without detectable anti-S IgG anitbodies to SARS-CoV-2 immunization had detectable SARS-CoV-2 B and T cell responses after SARS-CoV-2 vaccination, which would possibly provide some protection against severe disease even in the absence of anti-S antibodies.

Findings indicate a high degree of variability in SARS-CoV-2-specific B and T cell responses in patients with MM. The unexpected lack of T cell responses, coupled with an absence of anti-S antibodies following SARS-CoV-2 vaccination, particularly in MM patients actively receiving anti-CD38 and anti-BCMA antibody-based therapies, emphasizes the need for serological testing after vaccination to identify this specific subgroup of MM patients. In the climate of highly transmissible viral variants (e.g., Delta variant), booster vaccination, safety precautions, and passive antibody treatments should be considered in order to prevent morbidity and mortality from COVID-19 in MM patients with suboptimal vaccine responses.

Shailee Vora; Andriana Kotini, PhD; Malgorzata Olszewska; Ernesto Guccione, PhD; Julie Teruya-Feldstein, MD; Lewis Silverman, MD; Eirini Papapetrou, MD, PhD; and colleagues

Cancer Discovery. 2021 Oct 7. PMID: 34620690

This paper reports on the first study to show how mutations affecting RNA splicing alter cells to develop myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) and other malignancies. The research found that these mutations produce an alternative version of the protein created by the gene GNAS that can be targeted by MEK inhibitors already approved by the FDA for treating other cancers. Findings highlight an unexpected and unifying mechanism by which SRSF2 and U2AF1 mutations drive oncogenesis with potential therapeutic implications for MDS and other SF-mutant neoplasms.

Cansu Cimen Bozkus, PhD; Nina Bhardwaj, MD, PhD; Camelia Iancu-Rubin, PhD; John Mascarenhas, MD; and colleagues

Blood Advances. 2021 Sep 28. PMID: 34581778

This paper reports on an investigator-initiated, Mount Sinai-led, multi-institutional clinical trial of pembrolizumab, a Pd-1 inhibitor, in advanced myelofibrosis. The clinical trial, the first of its kind, involved robust collaboration with the laboratory teams of Nina Bhardwaj, MD, PhD, and Camelia Iancu-Rubin, PhD, and revealed correlative insights that will inform future approaches to immunotherapy in myeloid malignancies.

Guray Akturk, MD; Sacha Gnjatic, PhD; and colleagues

Clinical Cancer Research. 2021 Sep 15. PMID: 34253580

The Cancer Immune Monitoring and Analysis Centers - Cancer Immunologic Data Commons (CIMAC-CIDC) network supported by the NCI Cancer Moonshot initiative provides correlative analyses for clinical trials in cancer immunotherapy. A fundamental component is the use of multiplex IHC assays to define the composition and distribution of immune infiltrates within tumors in the context of their potential role as biomarkers. To assess the relative fidelity of such assays to reliably quantify tumor-associated immune cells across different platforms, three CIMAC sites compared across their laboratories image analysis algorithms, image acquisition platforms, and multiplex staining protocols. Results support interchangeability of protocols and platforms to deliver robust and comparable data using similar tissue specimens, and confirm that CIMAC-CIDC analyses may be used with confidence for statistical associations with clinical outcomes across different sites.

Julie Di Martino, PhD; Tasmiah Akhter; Jose Javier Bravo-Cordero, PhD

Cancers. 2021 Sep 30. PMID: 34638400

Fred Hirsch, MD, PhD; Philip Mack, PhD; and colleagues

Clinical Lung Cancer. 2021 Oct 10. In press, journal pre-proof

Miriam Merad, MD, PhD, presented a keynote lecture—"Mapping myeloid programs that control tumor immunity"—at the American Association for Cancer Research Immunology meeting, held Oct 5-6. Meeting Program

Faculty from the Center of Excellence for Multiple Myeloma were well represented at the International Myeloma Workshop, held in September.

Ajai Chari, MD, chaired a session on the role of non-cellular modern therapeutics in the treatment of myeloma and presented “Early clinical results of alternative targets for bispecifics and next generation T-cell redirectors.”

Sundar Jagannath, MBBS, presented updated results from CARTITUDE-1: Ciltacabtagene autoleucel, a B-cell maturation antigen-directed CAR T-cell therapy in relapsed/refractory multiple myeloma. He also co-led a Plenary Session discussion on myeloma residual disease-guided therapy.

Oliver Van Oekelen, MD, PhD student in the lab of Samir Parekh, MBBS, presented:

Mount Sinai Brooklyn participated in the American Cancer Society’s Making Strides Against Breast Cancer Brooklyn Walk in October (Breast Cancer Awareness Month). Pictured are members of the team, including Michael Zeidman, MD, and Arvind Kamthan, MD.

  TCI Connections  is a monthly publication of The Tisch Cancer Institute

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