Molecular Targeted Radiosensitizers

Henning Willers, M.D., is an Associate Professor of Radiation Oncology at Harvard Medical School and an Associate Radiation Oncologist in the Department of Radiation Oncology at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is also the Director of the Thoracic Radiation Oncology Program at Massachusetts General Hospital. As a clinician-scientist, Dr. Willers' clinical efforts have focused on improving treatment outcomes for patients with lung cancer. His basic and translational research activities are directed at elucidating how lung cancers respond to radiation and radiosensitizing drugs, and specifically seeking to identify the signaling pathways that contribute to the radioresistance of KRAS-mutant lung adenocarcinoma. Dr. Willers' lab also studies the DNA repair pathways that are increasingly recognized to be altered in lung cancer and other cancer types. The goal of these studies is to establish genomic as well as functional protein biomarkers that will allow clinicians to identify patients whose tumors will exhibit increased sensitivity to specific DNA damaging treatments, including proton beam radiation and PARP inhibitors.

Iris Eke is currently a researcher at Stanford University. She earned her M.D. at the Technical University Munich, Germany. During her Ph.D. in Experimental Radiation Oncology at the Technical University Dresden, Germany, she focused on the innovative concept to target cell-extracellular matrix interactions to overcome radio- and chemoresistance and elucidated several new mechanistic insights. At the National Cancer Institute, National Institute of Health, Dr. Eke studied the mechanisms of tumor adaptation after multifractionated radiotherapy with the goal to identify novel potential drug therapy targets involving radiation-induced target activation and DNA repair.