Speakers of Harvard Medical School

Irene Ghobrial, MD

Irene Ghobrial, MD is a Professor of Medicine and Senior Physician at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School and Lavine Family Chair for Preventative Cancer Therapies. Her clinical and laboratory research focuses on understanding mechanisms of disease progression from early precursor conditions, including monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance (MGUS) and smoldering myeloma (SMM) to overt Multiple Myeloma (MM). She is disrupting the cancer care model in myeloma by leading screening for early detection, developing novel biomarkers for risk stratification, and disrupting the treatment paradigm with innovative clinical trials in smoldering myeloma. She believes that her translational research efforts will change the way we detect and treat myeloma completely in the next few years. Dr. Ghobrial’s passion is to rapidly translate laboratory findings to the clinic and to use samples from clinical trials to define better biomarkers of response/resistance to therapy. She has led over 15 investigator-initiated clinical trials and now focuses on developing multiple precision interception approaches in MGUS and SMM, mostly focusing on immunotherapy with vaccines, bispecific antibodies, and CAR-T or NK cell therapies with a common end goal, to eradicate myeloma before it starts.

Nikhil C. Munshi, MD

Nikhil Munshi, MD is the Kraft Family Chair and Professor of Medicine at the Harvard Medical School and the Director of Basic and Correlative Science at the Jerome Lipper Myeloma Center at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Dr. Munshi’s research focus spans both basic sciences to understand genomic changes in myeloma and elucidate molecular mechanisms driving the genomic instability in cancer, to translational approaches directed at improving diagnosis and prognosis as well as therapeutics. Dr Munshi’s clinical interests include CAR T-cell therapy in multiple myeloma and developing novel targeted therapeutics including novel antigen-directed and immune effector cell therapy/vaccine approaches. He has over 500 peer-reviewed publications and book chapters. He is the immediate former President of the International Myeloma Society. He has received number of Awards including the Dr. B.C. Roy National Award by the president of India in 2016, the prestigious “Waldenström’s Award” for Most Distinguished Lifetime Achievement in Myeloma Research in 2013, the COMy “Multiple Myeloma Excellence Award for Translational Research” in 2019 and Robert Kyle Award in 2021.

Dr. Anderson

Kenneth C. Anderson, MD

Dr. Anderson is the Kraft Family Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School as well as Director of the LeBow Institute for Myeloma Therapeutics and Jerome Lipper Multiple Myeloma Center at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He is a Doris Duke Distinguished Clinical Research Scientist and American Cancer Society Clinical Research Professor. After graduating from Johns Hopkins Medical School, he trained in internal medicine at Johns Hopkins Hospital, and then completed hematology, medical oncology, and tumor immunology training at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Over the last four decades, he has focused his laboratory and clinical research studies on multiple myeloma. He has developed laboratory and animal models of the tumor in its microenvironment which have allowed for both identification of novel targets and validation of novel targeted therapies, and has then rapidly translated these studies to clinical trials culminating in FDA approval of novel targeted and immune therapies. His paradigm for identifying and validating targets in the tumor cell and its milieu has transformed myeloma therapy and markedly improved patient outcome.

Steven P. Treon, MD, PhD

Steven Treon, MD, PhD is the Director of the Bing Center for Waldenström’s Macroglobulinemia as well as an Attending Physician within the Department of Medical Oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. He is also an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and is the Chair of the Waldenström‘s Macroglobulinemia Clinical Trials Group. Dr. Treon‘s research focuses on understanding the genetic basis and pathogenesis of Waldenström‘s Macroglobulinemia as well as the development of therapeutics. He has published extensively and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Blood, Clinical Cancer Research and The Lancet. He is a member of multiple professional societies, including the American Medical Association, the American Society of Hematology, the American Society of Clinical Oncolocy, the European Society of Hematology and the Massachusetts Medical Society.

Hosts of the UKE