Benjamin D. Greenbaum, PhD
Immunotherapy has been a game changer in treating some cancers, but it does not work for every patient. Building mathematical models that might predict a patient’s response is central to the work of Benjamin D. Greenbaum, PhD, Assistant Professor of Medicine (Hematology and Medical Oncology), Oncological Sciences, and Pathology, at The Tisch Cancer Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. For his efforts, he recently won the Pershing Square Sohn Prize for Young Investigators in Cancer Research.
Dr. Greenbaum, a computational biologist, was among seven researchers to receive the award from the Pershing Square Sohn Cancer Research Alliance, a program of The Pershing Square Foundation. His laboratory will receive $200,000 yearly for the next three years. In a novel partnership, The Mark Foundation for Cancer Research will fully fund Dr. Greenbaum’s award, and has named him a Pershing Square Sohn Mark Foundation Fellow.
Dr. Greenbaum’s work “will be instrumental in understanding what types of T cells are required for generating effective anti-tumor immunity and how to design immune therapies that selectively induce their development,” says a longtime colleague and mentor, Nina Bhardwaj, MD, PhD, the Ward-Coleman Chair in Cancer Research, and Director of Cancer Immunotherapy, at The Tisch Cancer Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
Dr. Greenbaum began his career studying the evolution of viruses and later became interested in checkpoint blockade inhibitor immunotherapies, which help the body recognize and kill cancer cells, and for which the Nobel Prize was recently awarded. He led a group that created the first predictive mathematical model demonstrating how a set of melanoma and lung cancer patients would respond to certain immunotherapies, a finding described in November 2017 in the journal Nature. To further improve such models, “we work with clinicians, oncologists, immunologists, geneticists, and others to try to round out the full picture of how the immune system interacts with cancer,” Dr. Greenbaum says. “This is a very vibrant time in cancer immunotherapy.”