Discipline

Pediatric Hematologist/Oncologist

Interests

Hematologic malignancies, Cancer genomics

Biography

Dr. Stegmaier received her MD in 1996 from Harvard Medical School, and she completed her internship and residency in pediatrics at Children's Hospital Boston. She completed her Pediatric Hematology/Oncology Fellowship at Children's Hospital Boston/Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in 2002. She completed her post-docatoral fellowship in the laboratory of Dr. Todd Golub. In 2006, she launched her own laboratory at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

The Stegmaier laboratory focuses on the discovery of new cancer targets and small molecule therapeutic leads with the mission of translating laboratory findings to the clinic. In particular, her laboratory applies new chemical genomic approaches to the discovery of small molecule modulators of cancer, compounds that serve as tools in the laboratory to identify new cancer targets and as leads for molecularly informed drug discovery. In order to overcome the limitations to traditional target and phenotype-based screening, Dr. Stegmaier and her colleagues developed a chemical genomic approach to screening, gene expression-based high-throughput screening (GE-HTS), in which a gene expression signature serves as a surrogate for different biological states. The initial proof of principle experiments successfully applied this approach to the identification of inducers of acute myeloblastic leukemia (AML) differentiation. Because the GE-HTS platform is an entirely generic system, it can be applied to a multitude of small molecule library screens. Cancer discovery efforts in the laboratory are focused on the alteration of the malignant state (e.g. differentiation) and the modulation of undruggable oncoproteins (e.g. transcription factors). The laboratory exploits confirmed hits as tool compounds to explore mechanisms of oncogenesis using a variety of approaches: genomic, RNA interference, pharmacologic, and proteomic. The most ambitious goal is the translation of confirmed hits to clinical trial. Clinical trials for AML and Ewing sarcoma have resulted from their research.

Background

Board Certification
Pediatric Hematology/Oncology, 2002

Fellowship
Boston Children's Hospital/Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Pediatric Hematology/Oncology

Residency
Boston Combined Residency Program, Boston Children's Hospital/Boston Medical Center, Pediatrics

Medical School
Harvard Medical School, 1996