Dr. Guzman Receives $1.5 Million NIH Director's New Innovator Award
September 30, 2010
Monica L. Guzman, PhD, Assistant Professor of Pharmacology in Medicine, Weill Cornell Medical College, is among this year's recipients of the National Institutes of Health Director's New Innovator Awards. Established in 2008 to stimulate highly innovative research and support promising new investigators, the five-year award is for $1.5 million.
Dr. Guzman's work focuses on acute myeloid leukemia (AML), a blood cancer that starts in the bone marrow. Left untreated, AML is typically fatal within weeks or months, but even with the most aggressive treatments now available, AML has a high rate of relapse — even after a patient achieves complete remission. The culprit is thought to be a rare population of cells called leukemia stem cells (LSCs). Because they are resistant to chemotherapy, LSCs represent a source of perpetual reproliferation, and thus continual relapse.
The goal of Dr. Guzman's current project is to identify new treatments that can kill LSCs to eliminate this source of relapse. Toward this goal, she will define genetic signatures that represent drug sensitivity and resistance in LSCs and develop cell lines that mimic those characteristics to test possible new drugs. This ambitious effort brings together the expertise of several scientific and clinical investigators at Weill Cornell, including Gail J. Roboz, MD, Associate Professor of Medicine and Director of the Leukemia Program; Duane C. Hassane, PhD, Assistant Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the Institute for Computational Biomedicine; and Stefano Monni, PhD, Assistant Professor of Biostatistics in Public Health.
Dr. Guzman received her PhD in microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics from the University of Kentucky. She served for six years as a Senior Instructor with the Department of Medicine at the University of Rochester, and joined Weill Cornell Medical College as an Assistant Professor in 2009.