Dr. Hannah Uckelmann

Dr. Hannah Uckelmann’s Max-Eder junior research group focuses on studying the epigenetic regulation of self-renewal programs during cancer development and the discovery of new therapeutics.

Dr. Uckelmann received her master’s degree in Molecular Biosciences from the university of Heidelberg studying long-noncoding RNAs in liver cancer in the group of Prof. Sven Diederichs. She then moved on to pursue her PhD with Prof. Andreas Trumpp and Prof. Marieke Essers at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg, where she investigated the response of hematopoietic stem cells to inflammatory stress.

For her postdoctoral training, Dr. Uckelmann joined the group of Prof. Scott Armstrong at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston where she worked on the disruption of NPM1c mediated leukemic self-renewal through targeted epigenetic therapy. She was able to show that disrupting the MLL-complex on chromatin using Menin-MLL inhibitors can prevent the development of leukemia in NPM1c-mutant mouse models and treat fully developed human leukemias derived from patient samples. This preclinical work led to the inclusion of NPM1 mutant patients in the ongoing clinical phase II trials for Menin-MLL inhibitors.

Dr. Uckelmann continued investigating the mechanism of NPM1c-driven leukemogenesis as an instructor at Harvard Medical School. There she discovered an unexpected role of mutant NPM1 on chromatin representing the molecular basis for the effectiveness of targeted epigenetic therapies in NPM1 mutant AML. NPM1c cooperates with other chromatin factors to change the chromatin landscape and enhance transcriptional output at its target sites.

This new discovery opens up many exciting new avenues of research and potential ways of therapeutic targeting of these leukemias which the Uckelmann lab is planning to explore in the future.

Awards and Honors:

2024 Max Eder Junior Research Group, Deutsche Krebshilfe

2020 – 2022 The Charles A. King Trust Postdoctoral Fellowship

2020 – 2021 The Mark Foundation for Cancer Research Momentum Fellowship

2017 – 2020 DFG Postdoctoral Fellowship

2018 ASH Abstract Achievement Award

2014 ASH Abstract Achievement Award

2010 Ph.D. Stipend at the DKFZ Helmholtz International Graduate School inre

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