GRANT RECIPIENTS
KATIE OPPO RESEARCH FUND GIVES GRANT FOR OVARIAN CANCER CLINICAL TRIAL TO NORTHWELL HEALTH
The Katie Oppo Research Fund (KORF) is proud to announce its 2017 grant to Northwell Health to fund a clinical trial for patients diagnosed with advanced stage III and stage IV ovarian cancer. KORF’s goals are to honor Katie Oppo’s memory, raise awareness, and find prevention, treatment, and cure for all forms of ovarian cancer.
Katie Oppo was raised in Manhasset and was a nineteen-year-old pre-med student at Johns Hopkins University, as well as a research intern at Northwell Health, the summer of 2010. That August she returned from a family vacation and was diagnosed with stage IV Small Cell Carcinoma of the Ovary-Hypercalcemic Type (SCCOHT), a very rare and devastating form of ovarian cancer.
Katie was also a volunteer at Northwell Health the summer of 2009 — which is why it is so fitting that KORF has come full circle to fund this clinical trial, which might have extended her life, had it been available.
Katie, her family, and her friends never gave up hope for a cure. Although she passed on April 11, 2011, her memory lives on in the Research Fund. KORF continues the fight for a cure and the desire to help others with ovarian cancer. We believe that funding this clinical trial at Northwell Health gives back to the community that rallied around Katie — a community she dearly loved.
Research Grants
February 2019
Cold Spring Harbor Labs
December 2016
NYU Langone
August 2013
Johns Hopkins
July 2012
MSKCC
2017
Northwell Health
July 2015
MSKCC
July 2013
MSKCC
Scholarship Grants
2021
Tyshaun Gray
2019
Andrea Diaz
July 2016
Kimberly Te
July 2014
Priya Alageson
2020
Nyara Chambers
2018
Neyda Villalobos
June 2015
Jessica Kim
GALA HONOREES
Our 2018 Honoree Dr. Ramon Parsons, is the Director of The Tisch Cancer Institute at Mount Sinai. Ramon Parsons grew up in Washington, D.C. After earning his MD and PhD degrees from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, he was a postdoctoral fellow with Bert Vogelstein at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where he and his colleagues discovered that inactivation of DNA mismatch repair genes causes hereditary colorectal cancer. At Columbia University Medical Center, as Avon Professor of Pathology and Medicine and Leader of the Breast Cancer Program of the Herbert Irving Cancer Center, his research laboratory identified the PTEN tumor suppressor gene, which he showed is inactivated in a wide variety of cancers and cancer predisposition syndromes. Dr. Parsons has been a leader in establishing the importance of PTEN and the PI3K pathway for cancer using a combination of genetic, biochemical, human tissue, metabolic, and systems biology approaches, and has been awarded significant grant funding in support of his internationally-recognized research. In 2013, Dr. Parsons joined the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai as Ward-Coleman Professor in Cancer Research, Chairman of the Department of Oncological Sciences, and co-Leader of the Cancer Mechanisms Program of The Tisch Cancer Institute (TCI) at Mount Sinai. In 2017, he was appointed Director of TCI and Director of Mount Sinai Cancer for the Mount Sinai Health System. Dr. Parsons is a recipient of the 2011 American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Outstanding Investigator Award for Breast Cancer Research and served as Chair of the Special Conferences Committee at the AACR from 2011 to 2017 where he established an annual meeting dedicated to ovarian cancer research. He was inducted into the Johns Hopkins University Society of Scholars in 2015 and elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2017. Also in 2017, Dr. Parsons received an Outstanding Investigator Award from the National Cancer Institute.
Dr. Ramon Parsons
2018 Honoree
