Titles and Affiliations
Fellow, Hematology and Oncology
Conquer Cancer, the ASCO Foundation
Research Area
Developing new methods to detect remaining cancer in breast tissue after chemotherapy
Impact
Breast cancer outcomes are better when the disease is caught early and responds well to treatment. Chemotherapy is often given before surgery to shrink tumors but accurately measuring how much cancer remains afterwards continues to pose a challenge for clinicians. The current method of visually examining removed tissue under a microscope can miss tiny amounts of cancer that may lead to recurrence. For her Conquer Cancer research supported by BCRF, Dr. Ransohoff has developed a new DNA-based method to detect remaining cancer in breast tissue after chemotherapy.
What’s Next
Dr. Ransohoff and her team will compare her new approach to results from visual assessment by a pathologist. Initial data suggest the new method detects remaining cancer missed by visual assessment in patients who are at risk of cancer returning. This new approach may help predict which patients are at risk and help guide personalized treatments to improve patient outcomes.
Biography
Julia Ransohoff, MD is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Division of Medical Oncology, training in the American Board of Internal Medicine physician-scientist research pathway under the mentorship of Ash Alizadeh, MD, PhD; Melinda Telli, MD; and Allison Kurian, MD. Clinically, she treats patients with breast cancer in a practice enriched for hereditary and triple-negative disease. Her research efforts are focused on understanding the genomic and immunologic heterogeneity of breast tumor responses to treatment and variable clinical outcomes. To do so, she is currently focused on building and applying blood- and tissue based minimal residual disease technologies to breast cancer to identify patients with residual cancer after curative-intent treatment who require further treatment to prevent metastatic recurrences and to determine the clonal selection of tumor genomic alterations through chemotherapy. In related work, she models epidemiological risk factors for breast cancer mortality with a focus on the gut microbiome, antitumor immunity, and racial and ethnic differences in the response to breast cancer treatment.
