Iannis Aifantis Selected as Howard Hughes Medical Institute Early Career Scientist

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute announced today that Dr. Iannis Aifantis, Associate Professor of Pathology, is among the 50 top scientists who will be appointed as the first Early Career Scientists of the Institute in September 2009. Each HHMI Early Career Scientist will receive a six-year appointment to the Institute and, along with it, the freedom to explore his or her best ideas without worrying about where to find the money to fund those experiments. The new research initiative is intended to provide much-needed support to some of the nation’s best junior faculty at a critical stage in their careers. This honor establishes Dr. Aifantis, who joined the Department of Pathology in 2006, as one of the foremost and most outstanding young scientists in the country.

The 50 successful appointees were selected from a pool of over 2,000 applicants on the basis of their potential for significant research productivity and originality. They are expected to use HHMI’s investment of approximately $200 million into this new initiative as an opportunity to move in new directions, including some with a high degree of scientific risk that would be unlikely to be funded by other organizations. Like HHMI Investigators, the Early Career Scientists will have the freedom to explore and, if necessary, change direction in their research. They are granted the flexibility to follow their scientific lines of inquiry and take risks rather than relying on specific research grants for predefined projects.

Dr. Aifantis has made majors strides toward the understanding and the development of new treatments for T-cell acute lymphocytic leukemia, a common form of leukemia in children. He recently discovered a molecular door by which T cells, the soldiers of the immune system, slip into spinal fluid and the brain after they become malignant. Blocking this process could save thousands of lives each year. Dr. Aifantis is now testing hundreds of potential drugs that might slam that door shut and prevent malignant T cells from reaching the nervous system. At the same time, he is learning what goes awry in blood stem cells that transform into leukemic T cells. Such insights may provide new opportunities to combat deadly blood cancers.

Before joining NYU, Dr. Aifantis worked under the direction of Dr. Harald von Boehmer, both as graduate student at the Necker Institute in Paris and as a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School. After the completion of his post-doctoral fellowship, Dr. Aifantis established his own laboratory in the Department of Medicine at the University of Chicago. In 2006 he was recruited to join the NYU Department of Pathology’s translational research efforts as a faculty member of the Program in Immunology because of his promise to become an international leader in the fields of hematopoiesis and leukemia. With this appointment, Dr. Aifantis has become the third HHMI appointee from the NYU Department of Pathology, following Dr. Dan Littman, the Helen L. and Martin S. Kimmel Professor of Molecular Immunology and Professor of Pathology and Microbiology, and Dr. Michele Pagano, the May Ellen and Gerald Jay Ritter Professor of Oncology and Professor of Pathology.

Photo: David B. Roth