Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has announced a $10 million commitment from the Montreal-based Rossy Foundation to establish the David Liposarcoma Research Initiative.

With the aim of advancing treatments for liposarcoma, a rare, underfunded, and understudied disease, the five-year initiative will support collaborative research across departments at Dana-Farber — including liposarcoma biology, biochemistry, immunology, metabolism, genomics, and epigenetics — and partner organizations. Research to improve fundamental understanding of the molecular mechanisms of liposarcoma could lead to the development of new approaches to overcoming treatment resistance and strategies for translating clinical research into improved patient outcomes.

To that end, the initiative will bring together the teams of eleven principal investigators from four institutions — Dana-Farber, Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women's Hospital, and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard — who will collaborate on interconnected projects that build on the virtuous cycle of discovery, validation, and clinical testing.

"The visionary and forward-looking support from the Rossy Foundation will greatly enhance our understanding of the underlying biology, genomics, epigenetics, immunologic, and other mechanistic characteristics of liposarcomas," said George Demetri, director of the Sarcoma Center, senior vice president for experimental therapeutics, and Quick Family Chair in Medical Oncology at Dana-Farber. "It is our hope that the new research collaborations made possible by this commitment will ultimately lead to better therapeutic options for patients diagnosed with this rare disease."