Mass General Brigham Announces 2025 Recipients of Krantz Awards for Cancer Research

The 2025 class of awardees will receive more than $6 million in funding to accelerate groundbreaking cancer research.

BOSTON, MA – The Krantz Family Center for Cancer Research at the Mass General Brigham Cancer Institute today announced the selection of 19 scientists who have been awarded a combined $6 million in funding. These competitive annual awards were established to recognize the trailblazing efforts of Krantz Center scientists and accelerate ideas, projects and initiatives with the potential to fundamentally change how cancer is diagnosed and treated.

Philanthropists Jason and Keely Krantz, who, in September of 2023, made a transformative gift to cancer research at Mass General Brigham, included annual funding for innovative and collaborative projects, advanced technologies to support these projects and an endowment to ensure sustainability. The class of awardees announced for 2025 reflects the Krantz Center’s commitment to supporting cutting-edge research with the potential for clinical impact.

The awards are distributed to individual investigators and collaborative teams in four tiers: Quantum Awards (with up to $2 million in funding to support a major initiative poised to have a definitive impact on fundamental cancer research, diagnostics or therapeutics); Breakthrough Awards (with up to $1 million for transformative projects based on research findings poised for expansion and scale); Spark Awards (with up to $100,000 to support exploratory research projects with the potential to yield major initiatives); and Technology Awards (to purchase advanced technologies to support leading-edge laboratory research).

The 2025 recipients were determined through a rigorous selection process which included internal and external scientific review. The final decisions were based on the individual projects’ scientific merit and their potential to transform our understanding of cancer and to impact the future of cancer treatment.

“Keely and I continue to be inspired by the exceptional work conducted by physicians and scientists across the Krantz Family Center for Cancer Research,” said Jason Krantz, founder and managing partner of Breachway Capital and founder and executive chairman of Definitive Healthcare. “We’re energized by the 2025 awardees and their cross-disciplinary collaborations designed with a common goal – to bring lifesaving therapies and diagnostics to patients everywhere as quickly as possible.”

2025 Krantz Award Recipients

The Quantum Award was presented to the team of Marcela Maus, MD, PhD, Matt Frigault, MD, and Rob Manguso, PhD. The team will receive $2 million over two years to continue to improve chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy. This collaboration brings together Krantz Center investigators Drs. Maus and Manguso with clinical cellular therapy expert Dr. Frigault. This team has determined how to test which genes might make CAR T-cells stronger and more effective in laboratory models. Next, they will launch a first-in-the-world study where pancreatic cancer patients will receive specially engineered CAR T-cells while researchers test which genetic changes can boost their power. If successful, this approach could lead to effective CAR T-cell therapies for many more types of cancer.

The following teams were selected to receive Breakthrough Awards, which include $1 million per team over two years:

• Andrea McClatchey, PhD, and Nabeel Bardeesy, PhD, will collaborate on a new bile duct cancer-focused research project that builds on Mass General Brigham’s leadership in this field. Their work aims to uncover how bile duct cancers originate and why some respond well to treatments while others do not, paving the way for more personalized therapies.
• Deb Sen, PhD, Andrew Elia, MD, PhD, and Daphne Haas-Kogan, MD, will explore whether a drug affecting DNA damage response can reinvigorate exhausted T-cells in models of pediatric brain tumors. Their findings could open an entirely new way to boost the immune system’s ability to fight cancer.
• Konrad Hochedlinger, PhD, Hanno Hock, MD, PhD, and Peter van Galen, PhD, will work together to uncover why a single key mutation in a chromosome component can lead to specific types of cancer, like lymphoma and leukemia. Their work could reveal fundamental cancer mechanisms with wide-reaching implications across blood cancers and solid tumors.

The following scientists were selected to receive Spark Awards, which include $100,000 in funding per recipient:

• Mikolaj Slabicki, PhD, to develop a new technology that uses the cell’s own degradation pathways to break down cancer-causing genes.
• Raul Mostoslavsky, MD, PhD, to use spatial transcriptomics to study models of aging and aging-related cancers.
• John Iafrate, MD, PhD, and Liron Bar-Peled, PhD, to design new chemistry to improve drugs targeting ALK-positive lung cancer.
• Avanish Mishra, PhD, and David Walt, PhD, to create a diagnostic tool combining circulating tumor cells and digital protein assays to guide treatment decisions for antibody-drug conjugates.
• Moshe Sade-Feldman, PhD, and Megan Mooradian, MD, to investigate whether freezing a single tumor (cryoablation) can activate the immune system and boost immunotherapy effectiveness in melanoma.

In addition to the research-focused awards, there are grants for advanced technologies through the Technology Awards. This year, the awards will fund a powerful computational infrastructure (graphics processing unit, or GPU) for AI-based cancer research.

“The research teams funded by the Krantz Awards are enabling our investigators and collaborators to chart new territory in cancer research,” said Daniel Haber, MD, PhD, director of the Krantz Family Center for Cancer Research and director emeritus of the Mass General Cancer Center. “This year’s awardees are creating exceptional scientific and clinical partnerships with the goal of uncovering new and more effective ways to fight cancer.”

Additional information about this year’s awardees and their research can be found here.

About the Krantz Family Center for Cancer Research

With 60 independent laboratory-based faculty members with appointments across different departments at Mass General and Harvard Medical School, and more than 500 postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, trainees and technicians, the Krantz Family Center for Cancer Research is home to some of the brightest scientific minds all focused on one goal: understanding the fundamental biology that drives cancer and applying that knowledge toward its eradication. Investigators have established an international reputation for scientific excellence, and for collaborative partnerships that bridge from basic research to patient care.