James Ferrara, MD, DSc
Dr. James Ferrara is the Ward-Coleman professor of Cancer medicine and director the Center for Translational Research in Hematologic Malignancies a the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. A physician-scientist whose clinical and research career has focused on the immunology of BMT, particularly its major complication graft-versus-host-disease (GVHD), he has used highly innovative proteomic techniques to discover and validate serum biomarkers for skin, gut and steroid-resistant GVHD. He founded the Mount Sinai Acute GVHD International Consortium (MAGIC) to create an exceptionally informative, multicenter database and biorepository that has identified biomarkers that predict response to treatment and that can guide GVHD therapy. Dr. Ferrara’s pioneering mechanistic studies have illuminated unexpected interactions between the innate and adaptive immune systems and have led to both conceptual breakthroughs and the discovery of novel therapeutic targets. A number of BMT leaders have trained in his laboratory and he hopes his research will make BMT safer and more effective for all patients.
John Levine, MD, MS
Dr. John Levine is the Louis Aledort Clinical Research Professor in Hematology and Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. He is a clinical and translational investigator with a research focus of acute graft-versus-host disease (GVHD). As co-director of MAGIC, Dr. Levine led the effort that created international guidelines to standardize GVHD staging and grading, oversees the Data Coordinating Center that maintains the database/biorepository and conducts clinical trials, and develops clinical applications for GVHD biomarkers, He has led multiple novel phase I, II, and III investigator initiated clinical trials to develop biomarker-guided, risk adapted clinical GVHD therapy through MAGIC. He also provides leadership to the field as chair elect of the Blood and Marrow Transplant Clinical Trials Network (he will be chair in 2024) and as chair of the Children’s Oncology Group Cellular Therapy Committee from 2016-2023.