Caron A. Jacobson, M.D., MMSc

Associate Professor, Harvard Medical School
Medical Director, Immune Effector Cell Therapy Program, Dana FarberCancer Institute
Principal Investigator and Lymphoma Specialist, Dana Farber Cancer Institute/Brigham and Women's Hospital

I am so honored and appreciative to receive the Young Investigator Award from the Lymphoma Foundation of America. Thank you for this tremendous honor.

I work and collaborate with a spectacular group of locally and abroad to try to improve outcomes for patients with lymphoma. I am so often humbled by their knowledge, creativity, and success. To be recognized among them is one of the highest compliments I could receive.

I am a lymphoma clinician and clinical investigator as well as the medical director of the Immune Effector Cell Therapy Program at Dana Farber Cancer Institute. My research focuses on the use of CAR t-cells and other engineered cellular therapies for the treatment of lymphoma and other cancers. I run industry sponsored and investigator initiated studies in lymphoma, and oversee a research and clinical program that includes the use of cellular therapies for the treatment of other hematologic as well as solid malignancies. I also help to coordinate translational research, using patient samples to study immunologic, molecular, and genetic markers that associate response, resistance, and toxicity to these therapies. The hope is that this research will help to extend the success of CAR t-cell to more patients with leukemia and lymphoma, and into other diseases.

I hope that the work I am doing now on CAR T-cell therapy and other cellular immunotherapies will tell us why some patients with aggressive lymphomas do not respond or do not stay in remission, and help us to improve these therapies so these patients do respond and do not have recurrences. This work should also help us develop new therapies for the treatments of different lymphomas, including indolent lymphomas, T-cell lymphomas, and Hodgkin lymphoma, as well as other types of cancers. These therapies have the potential to cure diseases in their advanced stages, and so expanding this work will be vital. This is the end of the beginning and I am excited to be part of it and to see where this takes us!