These awards recognize the highest-scoring abstracts submitted by first or senior author trainees, and each comes with a $500 stipend to assist with travel expenses.

Read more about ASH Recognizes Eight UF College of Pharmacy Trainees With Abstract Awards.

Lamba is one of five new associate editors selected by the journal. The bi-monthly, open-access journal publishes a range of article types, including original research articles, minireviews and viewpoints that address all areas of pharmacology and experimental therapeutics. ASPET Discovery released its first volume earlier this year, led by the inaugural editor-in-chief, John D. Schuetz, Ph.D.

Read more about Dr. Jatinder Lamba Named Associate Editor of ASPET Discovery Journal.

Learn more about technologies discovered by Jatinder Lamba.

Acute myeloid leukemia, or AML, is a blood cancer originating in bone marrow and is often fatal. It’s one of the most common leukemias in adults and can progress quickly.

A team led by Jatinder Lamba, Ph.D., associate dean for research and graduate education and a professor of pharmacotherapy and translational research in the UF College of Pharmacy, developed the Acute Leukemia Methylome Atlas, or ALMA, by mapping specific tags in DNA referred to as methylation patterns across 3,300 leukemia samples. 

The score could be used to identify patients more likely to have worse outcomes and optimize their treatment, according to the study of a large group of pediatric, adolescent and young adult patients with AML. The study was published on June 23 in JAMA Network Open.

“We showed the application of the score in one of the largest pediatric trials led by the Children’s Oncology Group and in adolescent and young adult patients treated across several trials led by Alliance,” said senior author Jatinder Lamba, Ph.D., a professor and dean in the UF College of Pharmacy and co-leader of the UF Health Cancer Center’s Cancer Targeting and Therapeutics research program. “Our results show the score is predictive of the outcome independent of the age groups, broadening its application.”

Led by Jatinder Lamba, Ph.D., co-leader of the UF Health Cancer Center’s Cancer Targeting and Therapeutics research program, the team identified genes that were associated with resistance or sensitivity to chemotherapy and linked these with patients’ treatment outcomes. The findings, published recently in the American Society of Hematology’s journal Blood Advances, could help develop new treatments to overcome resistance to chemotherapy.

Personalizing chemotherapy treatment using a predictive score can improve long-term survival in acute myeloid leukemia patients by as much as 9 percent compared with a non-personalized approach when applied to the overall population. It can improve outcomes by about 30 percent in individual patients matched to a more intense chemotherapy regimen, according to the study, published July 30 in Clinical Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.

“Given the genetic basis of the score, it could be used by clinicians preemptively to match patients with the most effective treatment regimen to lead to remission,” said Jatinder Lamba, Ph.D., associate dean for research and graduate education and a professor in the UF College of Pharmacy who led the multi-institution study and serves as co-leader of the UF Health Cancer Center’s Cancer Targeting and Therapeutics research program.

“This study advances our development of personalized treatment strategies for leukemia by uncovering how the drug attacks cancer cells differently based on a patient’s genetics,” said Jatinder Lamba, Ph.D., associate dean for research and graduate education and a professor in the UF College of Pharmacy, and lead author of the study, published in the American Association for Cancer Research journal Clinical Cancer Research. “By uncovering more about how genetic differences affect responses to novel treatments, we can target new drugs to the patients who are most likely to have the greatest clinical benefit.”

Acute myeloid leukemia, or AML, is the second most common form of childhood leukemia and is among the childhood cancers with the worst prognosis. While intensive chemotherapy and hematopoietic stem cell transplantation are still the mainstay of AML therapy, targeted therapies such as monoclonal antibodies and small-molecule inhibitors have emerged as promising approaches. One of these targeted therapies is an anti-leukemic drug called gemtuzumab ozogamicin, or GO.

The technology is available for licensing here.