“Cancer Gene Variant Classification: From the Lab to the Clinic and Back”

The Case Comprehensive Cancer Center will host a seminar series event Friday, April 13, from noon to 1 p.m. in the Iris S. and Bert L. Wolstein Research Building auditorium. The event will feature Theodora Ross, who holds the Jeanne Ann Plitt Professorship in Breast Cancer Research and is the H. Ben and Isabelle T. Decherd Chair in Internal Medicine, in Honor of Henry M. Winans, Sr., MD, at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. Ross will present “Cancer Gene Variant Classification: From the Lab to the Clinic and Back.” Learn more about the series.

Speaker details

Ross received her MD and PhD from the Washington University Medical Scientist Training Program in St. Louis. She completed her medical residency at Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, followed by a fellowship in oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Ross started her independent career in 1999 as an oncologist, teacher and researcher at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. There she cared for women with breast cancer and investigated the roles of the endocytic protein, HIPl, in cancer as well as the mechanisms of transformation by leukemic chromosomal translocations. Ross joined the University of Texas Southwestern in 2011. Her team in Dallas continues to pursue these avenues of research and also investigates BRCA1, a breast and ovarian cancer susceptibility gene, and its role in normal and abnormal hematopoiesis. In her current clinical practice, Ross cares for individuals at a high genetic risk for any type of cancer and serves as the director of the University of Texas Southwestern Cancer Genetics Program. In this role, she’s had the opportunity to combine her lab’s studies of genetic variations in cancer genes with clinical data from the program’s patients. To help communicate with patients and their relatives, she wrote a lay person’s guide book to genetics, A Cancer in the Family, which was published by Penguin/Random House in February 2016.