Summer 2025
By Kathleen Clute
Photography by Sam Ogden
The Edward P. Evans Foundation has awarded $1.65 million in grants to three Dana-Farber researchers studying a group of conditions caused by malfunctioning bone marrow.
Myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) are a group of rare blood disorders in which the bone marrow does not make enough healthy blood cells. Symptoms of MDS can vary but often include fatigue, shortness of breath, easy bruising or bleeding, and increased susceptibility to infections. About 30% of patients with MDS will develop acute myeloid leukemia (AML).
“Finding better treatments for MDS means investing in promising, innovative, and high-impact research,” said Timothy Graubert, MD, president of the Edward P. Evans Foundation. “I have every confidence that the work of these talented Dana-Farber investigators will help us make enormous strides toward a cure.”
“I have every confidence that their work will help us make enormous strides toward a cure.”
Timothy Graubert, MD, Edward P. Evans Foundation
The foundation awarded Lachelle Weeks, MD, PhD, a 2024 Discovery Research Grant for her investigations into clonal hematopoiesis (CH), a precursor of blood cancers such as MDS. Because the chemotherapy and radiation prescribed for various cancers can damage healthy blood and bone marrow cells, some patients develop therapy-related MDS that makes it difficult to safely continue treating the primary cancer. MDS can also arise in cancer survivors as an often fatal side effect of their treatment.
Weeks and her team are studying how CH causes significantly low blood cell counts during treatment with the goal of developing a tool that could identify individuals at high risk for therapy-related MDS and enable future clinical trials.
Nicole Prutsch, PhD, and Michelle Robinette, MD, PhD, received 2024 Evans MDS Young Investigator Awards. Prutsch studies TET2 mutant CH, where TET2 mutant stem cells and inflammatory macrophages increase the risk of MDS and atherosclerosis. Prutsch aims to uncover the key molecular mechanisms that drive this process and identify strategies to reduce inflammation and disease progression.
Robinette’s work focuses on the link between MDS and systemic and inflammatory autoimmune diseases (SIAD). Researchers have long known that people with MDS tend to have more SIAD than the general populace, and that some mutated blood cells can use inflammation signals to grow.
Robinette is studying somatic mutations in the gene UBA1, which lead to severe SIAD as well as MDS, to learn how they cause inflammation in many different organs. She is also researching whether patients with MDS have other mutations that can be linked to SIAD.
The Edward P. Evans Foundation has funded more than $14 million in Dana-Farber research focused on MDS and AML since 2013 and established the Edward P. Evans Center for Myelodysplastic Syndromes at Dana-Farber.