At the 2026 CLL Global Research Foundation Alliance Meeting, Dr. Christopher Oakes explained the positive impact of the Foundation’s funding and its role in advancing the understanding and treatment of CLL.
Guest
Christopher Oakes, PhD
Associate Professor of Hematology
OSUCCC – James: Cancer Treatment and Research Center
Transcript:
Dr. Christopher Oakes:
So, my name’s Christopher Oakes. I am an associate professor in hematology at the Ohio State University. I’ve been studying CLL for almost two decades now. I’ve had a lab at Ohio State that’s focused on CLL and other hematological malignancies for more than ten years now. I am very interested in CLL; it’s one of the core malignancies that we study. So, this year, my lab was awarded a CLL Global Research Foundation award to continue some of the work that we’re doing in CLL.
It’s been immensely helpful. We’ve had several projects that we’ve been interested in that we’ve wanted to follow for the past several years. But, of course, resources and funding is always the limiting factor. And the Global Foundation was able to fund one of our projects that we weren’t able to get funded from other sources. So, CLL research is, like I said, it’s a fascinating area to study. It’s been, in many cases, it’s been leading in certain hematological malignancies, concepts of genomic evolution, and therapy.
But the CLL research community has almost been a victim of its own success. So, it’s a double-edged sword. We’ve made some fantastic advancements in patient care and understanding the disease. But with that, the significance and impact – the perception of that has gone down and made it more difficult for researchers in the community to be able to compete with other diseases because of the patient needs. So, having a foundation like the CLL Research Global Foundation has been immensely helpful in picking up some of those areas that are more difficult to get funded from elsewhere.