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.

Paul G. Richardson, MD

Paul Richardson, MD is the Clinical Program Leader and Director of Clinical Research at the Jerome Lipper Multiple Myeloma Center and RJ Corman Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and has led the development of several first-generation novel drugs including bortezomib, lenalidomide and pomalidomide. More recently, his clinical innovations have been in the development of the breakthrough monoclonal antibodies elotuzumab and daratumumab for the treatment of both untreated and relapsed myeloma, as well asisatuximab and more broadly, antibody drug conjugates as well as other immunotherapeutic strategies. Furthermore he is leading the development of melflufen, a targeted cytotoxic and a first-in-class small molecule inhibitor selinexor, which inhibits XPO-1, a key nuclear export protein. He has published extensively, having authored or co-authored over 380 original articles and 300 reviews, chapters and editorials in peer-reviewed journals. In addition to holding positions on the editorial boards of leading journals, he is member of several committees and alliances and has received numerous awards for his work.

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.

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