Stefanie Sarantopoulos, MD, PhD, associate professor of medicine (Hematological Malignancies and Cellular Therapy) has received notice of her first R01 award from the National Institutes of Health.
Dr. Sarantopoulos’ research project, “Pathological B cells: Novel Strategies to Prevent and Treat Chronic GVHD,” aims to determine mechanisms that drive or suppress pathological B cells after hematopoietic cell transplantation, so that targeted and preventative therapies can be effectively devised.
In addition to the laboratory science, the five-year, $3.2 million award from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), funds a Phase I clinical trial to test the safety and the ability of a novel small molecule inhibitor to target patient B cells after allogeneic (donor) stem cell transplantation.
Dr. Sarantopoulos also recently received a three-year, $600,000 translational research grant from the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society to fund her research project looking at the Notch2-BCR Axis: Targeting Drivers of B-Cell Fate in Chronic Graft-versus-host disease.