Dateline DFCI
Anderson wins first Doris Duke Foundation award for research
Buoying his research with a new source of support, Kenneth Anderson, M.D., medical director of the Kraft Family Blood Donor Center, has been named one of four winners of the first Doris Duke Distinguished Clinical Science Awards for Excellence in Bench to Bedside Research. The awards, created in 1999 by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, will provide each recipient with $3 million in research funds over a five-year period.
Anderson's research focuses on multiple myeloma, an incurable cancer of the bone marrow that strikes nearly 14,000 Americans a year. At Dana-Farber, Anderson has assembled a research team that is taking a novel approach to the disease — studying myeloma cells in the context of their "microenvironment," the bone marrow. The aim is to develop therapies that not only attack myeloma cells directly, but also make the bone marrow a less hospitable home for them — preventing the cells, for example, from growing networks of blood vessels or hiding from the cancer-fighting forces of the immune system.
