Summer 2025
By Kathleen Clute
Every year, about 3,000 Americans are diagnosed with ocular melanoma, a rare cancer that develops in the cells that produce pigment in the eye and is the most common form of eye cancer in adults, according to the American Cancer Society. The disease metastasizes in nearly half of all patients, and accounts for 5% of all melanomas. There is no cure.
Jonathan and Shelley Isaacson have made a $1 million gift to establish Dana-Farber’s first fellowship dedicated to the study of the disease, The Isaacson Family Fellowship in Ocular Melanoma.
The Isaacsons’ motivation was personal—their adult son had been diagnosed and treated for ocular melanoma as a teenager. “When somebody has cancer, the whole family goes through it together,” said Jonathan, chairman and CEO of the Gem Group, Inc., in Lawrence, Mass. “After that experience, we felt the need to get involved and do something. Our research showed that there isn’t a lot of funding for rare cancers, so this seemed like an opportunity.”
Rizwan Haq, MD, PhD, will appoint and mentor the Isaacson Family Fellow to investigate the genetic mutations that drive the disease and identify therapies to target those mutations. Haq is the director of Dana-Farber’s Ocular Melanoma Center.
For the past several years, Jonathan and Shelley have supported the work of Megha Shettigar, PhD, a research fellow in Haq’s lab who is using a revolutionary gene-editing technology known as CRISPR Cas9 to find therapeutic targets for treating melanoma.
Jonathan said he was inspired by his visits to the lab, where he observed “smart, dedicated people working really hard every day to find a solution. It has been very gratifying to support this, and to create an opportunity for a researcher to develop their skill set and become interested in this particular problem.”
“It’s an incredible experience, seeing smart, optimistic people working really hard every day to solve a problem.”
Jonathan Isaacson
The Isaacsons have endowed their family fellowship in perpetuity to ensure that there will always be funding for a fellow to focus on ocular melanoma.
Haq said that the Isaacsons’ support will generate new knowledge, develop the next generation of ocular melanoma experts, and enable important progress. “We need to better understand why melanoma spreads and why treatments don’t always work,” he said. “And to find new treatments when our existing strategies aren’t effective. The Isaacson fellows will help us do that.”