Suzanne George, MD
Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology
Boston, Massachusetts
Boston, Massachusetts
Titles and Affiliations
President and Interim Group Chair, Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology
Associate Professor, Medical Oncology
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute/Harvard Medical School
Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology
Boston, Massachusetts
Research area
Validating predictive and prognostic biomarkers in patients with post-chemotherapy residual breast cancer.
Impact
While chemotherapy is widely used for the treatment of breast cancer, for some patients, cancer cells remain following treatment and are presumably chemo resistant. The Alliance A011202 (NCT01901094) clinical trial enrolled over 4000 patients who were treated with chemotherapy prior to surgery. Because of the trial’s design, all patients enrolled have breast cancer that remains after chemotherapy, allowing for comparisons of tumors before and after chemotherapy. Dr. George is leveraging this large collection of samples to gain new insights and identify biomarkers of response to chemotherapy, information that will inform treatment decisions for breast cancer patients.
What’s Next
Dr. George and her Alliance colleagues will continue to collect and analyze these tissues to identify “biomarkers” of response to chemotherapy in specific subtypes of breast cancer. They hope to identify those people that will benefit most from chemotherapy, as well as those who may not benefit and can avoid unnecessary treatment.
Biography
Suzanne George, MD is the Interim Group Chair of the Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology, and President of the Alliance Foundation. In this role, Dr. George oversees and supports the scientific research mission of the Alliance, including the critical work of the Alliance Breast Cancer Committee, a leader in large national and international trials to improve the lives of women with breast cancer.
Prior to taking on this role, Dr. George served as Vice-Chair of Alliance for the past 6 years, again working across the organization to support the scientific mission of Alliance to improve the lives of people with cancer. She has led the development of the Alliance Participant Engagement Portal (PEP), a bidirectional platform to enhance participant clinical trial engagement throughout the clinical trial journey.
She also serves as the Associate Division Chief of Sarcoma at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute where she has been a clinical trialist for over 20 years and is an international leader in drug development in sarcomas. Dr. George is Associate Professor in Medicine, Harvard Medical School.
