 | Dr. Madhav V. Dhodapkar |
T H I S
Dr. Madhav Dhodapkar is the new
Bunker Professor of Hematology
Dr. Madhav V. Dhodapkar, the newly appointed Arthur H. and Isabel Bunker Professor
of Hematology, studies the interactions between tumor and immune system in
patients with multiple myeloma, an incurable but treatable cancer of the plasma
cell.
Multiple myeloma, which is characterized by clonal proliferation of plasma
cells in the bone marrow, often develops from a recognized premalignant state
called monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance (MGUS). About 25%
to 30% of those diagnosed with MGUS will later develop myeloma or related cancers,
but there are no known reliable predictors of this progression nor any known
methods to prevent the transition.
Dhodapkar’s laboratory is studying how the immune system permits the
transition to tumor cells, and is investigating strategies for boosting a patient’s
immunity to tumors by using vaccines based on dendritic cells and immunomodulatory
drugs. One strategy his team is investigating is the use of dendritic cells,
which the researchers have shown can be used to rapidly boost T cell immunity
in cancer patients. Other strategies include the use of chemical adjuvants
or immunomodulatory drugs such as thalidomide, which has led to clinical tumor
remissions in several myeloma patients, and the use of monoclonal antibodies,
which have been effective in treating patients with B cell tumors.
This March, Dhodapkar was appointed director of hematologic malignancies at
Yale Cancer Center. He was also named chief of the Section of Hematology in
the Department of Internal Medicine at Yale School of Medicine and Yale-New
Haven Hospital.
Dhodapkar comes to Yale from the faculty of Rockefeller University. He was
appointed an assistant professor there in 1998 and has been an associate professor
since 2004. He is also an adjunct faculty member at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering
Cancer Center.
After earning his medical degree in 1987 from the All India Institute of Medical
Sciences in New Delhi, Dhodapkar completed his residency in internal medicine
at the St. Louis University Hospital in 1990, pursued a four-year fellowship
in hematology and medical oncology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota,
and then spent three years as assistant professor of medicine at the Myeloma
Institute at the University of Arkansas Medical Sciences in Little Rock.
In 2002, Dhodapkar was named a New York Community Trust Scholar in Blood Diseases
Research. That same year he received the Irma T. Hirschl Career Scientist Award
and the Damon Runyon/Eli Lilly Translational Research Award. In 2000, he received
a National Institutes of Health Mentored Physician Scientist Award and in 1999
he received the Cancer Research Institute Investigator Award. In 1995, Dhodapkar
received the Florence A. Carter Fellowship in Leukemia Research, and he was
a 1994 recipient of the William F.J. Summerskill Award from the Mayo Foundation.
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