Bart Barlogie, MD, PhD
Bart Barlogie, MD, PhD, a world-renowned physician who introduced the first curative therapy for multiple myeloma, a multidrug regimen known as Total Therapy, recently joined The Tisch Cancer Institute as Director of Research in the Multiple Myeloma Program.
Dr. Barlogie will work with the program’s leader, Sundar Jagannath, MD, Professor of Medicine (Hematology and Medical Oncology), to develop new therapies to treat the disease, which is characterized by cancerous plasma cells that form in the bone marrow and crowd out normal, blood-forming cells. Their collaboration helps make Mount Sinai the nation’s premier myeloma program. About 26,850 new cases of the disease occur in the United States each year, according to the American Cancer Society.
“I’m dedicating my efforts toward improvement of patients with high-risk myeloma in whom we have made only negligible progress, as opposed to the 85 percent of patients presenting with genomically defined low-risk disease where we have a cure expectation of about 50 percent,” says Dr. Barlogie, who served for 26 years as Director of the Myeloma Institute for Research & Therapy at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS), an institute he founded.
By collaborating with Dr. Jagannath, he says, “We have a unique opportunity to move the field forward with our understanding of the underlying mechanisms that cause cells to become malignant.”
The physicians will work with colleagues in the Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences and Department of Immunology to identify suitable drugs that target gene mutations found in bone marrow samples taken from patients. Mount Sinai offers a unique opportunity to advance the team’s knowledge due to the depth and breadth of its basic science research, says Dr. Barlogie.
Dr. Barlogie’s scientific career has focused on biological and therapeutic research, including chemotherapy, immunotherapy, and hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. He developed the first effective salvage regimen (VAD) for melphalan-prednisone refractory myeloma, introduced autologous transplantation for myeloma, and identified thalidomide as a first-in-class novel agent for the treatment of myeloma. Together with John Shaughnessy, PhD, who also recently joined the Mount Sinai Health System, Dr. Barlogie developed gene expression profiling to identify molecular subclasses of myeloma and established a highly predictive risk model.
A Fellow of the American College of Physicians, Dr. Barlogie has served on the Board of Directors of the International Myeloma Foundation. He has received numerous honors, including the prestigious Jan Waldenstrom Award, the Celgene Career Achievement Award in Hematology Research, and the Robert A. Kyle Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Myeloma Foundation. He was also honored in 2006 with the National Physician of the Year Award by Castle Connolly Medical Ltd.
His published work includes more than 600 peer-reviewed journal articles, including five in The New England Journal of Medicine and 75 book chapters. Dr. Barlogie has served on the editorial boards of Blood, Clinical Cancer Research, and Clinical Lymphoma, Myeloma & Leukemia.