Dr. Leandro Cerchietti has received a Doris Duke Clinical Scientist Development Award (one of only 12 such awards given yearly by the Doris Duke Foundation). Funding is $150,000 per year spanning 3 years.
Dr. Cerchietti’s project centers on the role of metabolism in determining the clinical behavior of tumors, using metabolomic profiling for the study of B-cell lymphoma.
“Metabolism” is a term that refers to all the biochemical processes of an organ, tumor, or cell, that sustain life. These processes allow cells to grow, reproduce, maintain their structures and respond to environmental changes. Dr. Cerchietti’s study will reveal how — and what — the lymphoma “eats” to survive. It will also explore how these pathways can be “manipulated” in order to “starve them to death.” The goals is to ultimately launch the development of a new class of specific (and non-toxic drugs), and treatments, that could benefit patients with lymphomas.
“We will harness the power of metabolomic profiling to detect certain biological processes in patients; to ascertain whether drugs are hitting their targets in vivo; and to predict clinical outcomes in patients. I think this work has the potential to make important scientific and translational contributions to the diagnosis and treatment of B-cell lymphomas,” says Dr. Cerchietti.
New Developments in Lymphoma 