Medical Updates

Big news from the lab of former Gabrielle’s Angels grantee Dr. Scott Armstrong and his colleagues at Dana Farber! A new drug that not only could treat acute myeloid leukemia but also potentially prevent the cancer from developing is now being evaluated in clinical trials. This drug, SNDX-5613, successfully reversed leukemia development in mice and […]

We love this feature on one of our fabulous grantees, Dr. Esther Obeng of St. Jude! Not only is Dr. Obeng a first-generation American, she’s also designing studies to identify cancer-causing mutations and then developing clinical trials with revolutionary therapies that target them. “One of the reasons that I study the research that I do […]

Scientists have revealed how to modify CRISPR’s basic architecture to extend its reach beyond the genome and into the epigenome – proteins and small molecules that latch onto DNA and control when and where genes are switched on or off. Researchers at University of California San Francisco (UCSF) and the Whitehead Institute, both US, developed the […]

When researchers from Penn Medicine (including two of our grantees, Dr. Saar Gill and Dr. Marco Ruella!) found that many patients with B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) treated with the investigational chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy targeting the CD22 antigen didn’t respond, they went back to the drawing board to determine why. They […]

More details about the study from Gabrielle’s Angels grantee Dr. Etan Orgel! The study found that kids who ate healthier, slightly cut their calorie intake, and burned a bit more energy through exercise wound up with a lot fewer cancer cells lingering in their bodies following their first month of chemo, compared with an earlier […]

(left: Dr. Steven Mittelman, right: Dr. Etan Orgel) New research published today in the journal Blood Advances is the first to show that restricting calories, reducing fat and sugar intake, and increasing physical activity may boost the effectiveness of chemotherapy for older children and adolescents with leukemia. This intervention, which improved chemotherapy outcomes for children […]

Cancer cells can dodge chemotherapy by entering a state that bears similarity to certain kinds of senescence, a type of “active hibernation” that enables them to weather the stress induced by aggressive treatments aimed at destroying them, according to a new study by scientists at Weill Cornell Medicine (including Dr. Ari Melnick, former Gabrielle’s Angels […]

Congratulations to Gabrielle’s Angels grantee Dr. Marco Ruella and his colleagues at the Perelman School of Medicine University of Pennsylvania on this impressive breakthrough! Dr. Ruella and his team discovered that knocking out a protein known to stifle T cell activation on CAR T cells using the CRISPR/Cas9 technology enhanced the engineered T cells’ ability […]

Our researchers are not only making an impact in blood cancer research, they’re also making important discoveries in the fight against Covid. Immunologists Akiko Iwasaki, PhD, and Gabrielle’s Angels grantee Aaron Ring, MD, PhD, have identified autoantibodies in patients who have had COVID-19. Autoantibodies are antibodies (proteins produced in response to a pathogen) that mistakenly […]

More details about the important work that one of our grantees, Dr. Aaron Ring at Yale University, has been contributing to throughout the pandemic. He has been focused on discovering answers to questions like why do some people get so much sicker than others? What is behind the extended, multi-organ illness that lasts for months […]

Check out this fabulous feature on the rockstar women cancer researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, including Dr. Teresa Bowman and Dr. Hilda Ye who are Gabrielle’s Angel Foundation grantees! Read the full feature here. 

Congratulations to Gabrielle’s Angel Foundation grantee Dr. Herranz and his team for their recent publication in Blood Cancer Discovery! Their lab has successfully identified a tumor suppressor enhancer region of PTEN in T-cell leukemia. Keep up the great work Dr. Herranz! Read the full paper here.