Prostate Cancer Awareness – Newest Therapeutic Techniques

Dr. Tanya Dorff, medical oncologist and section chief, Genitourinary Disease Program at City of Hope, a leading-edge cancer research and treatment organization, discusses new targets in prostate cancer beyond prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA), the use of CAR T cell therapy in patients with prostate cancer, and the different combination of drugs that have shown efficacy. She also comments on the newest clinical trials happening in this space and their significance.

Tanya Barauskas Dorff, M.D., is an associate professor in the Department of Medical Oncology & Therapeutics Research and serves as section chief of the Genitourinary Disease Program at City of Hope. She is an internationally recognized leader in prostate cancer, and is renowned for her work in other genitourinary tumor types, including kidney, bladder and penile cancer.

Dr. Dorff graduated summa cum laude from University of Houston before attending the UCLA School of Medicine. There, she was inducted into the prestigious Alpha Omega Alpha honors society. She subsequently completed her internal medicine residency at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, and finished subspecialty training in hematology and oncology at Los Angeles County+USC Medical Center.

Dr. Dorff was on the faculty at USC for nearly 10 years, eventually amassing over 75 publications in top-tier journals, including Cancer, Lancet Oncology and Journal of Clinical Oncology. She has been invited to speak at multiple national and international meetings, and serves on the National Comprehensive Cancer Network Prostate Cancer Guidelines Committee and the National Cancer Institute Prostate Cancer Task Force.

Dr. Dorff’s research interests in prostate cancer are wide-ranging. In the area of clinical trials, she is heavily involved in the design and conduct of trials with immunotherapy and exploring treatment combinations. She has also worked on trials examining lifestyle (supplements, exercise) and treatment side effects (cognitive function). Recently she was awarded a Prostate Cancer Foundation/Pfizer grant to study talazoparib specifically in an ethnically diverse population, working together with Zijie (ZJ) Sun, M.D., Ph.D., and others.

Dr. Dorff leads City of Hope’s joint effort with the Prostate Cancer Foundation to develop novel immune-based strategies for prostate cancer. Specifically, she leads an effort to develop chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells – cells that are primed to target prostate cancer tissue. These strategies have been transformative in certain blood-based cancers. She is also engaging with TGen scientists Muhammad Murtaza, Ph.D., to investigate ctDNA as a biomarker, and Sarah Highlander, Ph.D., to study the role of the microbiome in earlier stage disease.

Dr. Dorff has assumed control of one of the largest clinical trial portfolios in genitourinary cancers, and treats patients with all types of genitourinary cancers, including testicular and penile cancer.