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Jan 17, 2025, 14:44

Razelle Kurzrock: BRAF mutations are not one size fits all

Razelle Kurzrock, Associate Director of Clinical Research for the Medical College of Wisconsin Cancer Center, posted on X:

“BRAF mutations are not one size fits all. Class III mutations especially sensitive to EGFR plus MEK inhibitors.

Know your target.”

Razelle Kurzrock, MD, is a world-renowned physician-scientist leader in precision medicine as well as in the development of novel therapeutics in the field of oncology. She is recognized for founding, developing and chairing one of the largest Phase 1 clinical trial departments globally while at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center; the central theme of the department was a personalized medicine strategy. She is also one of the pioneering trialists of the WINTHER precision medicine international trial focusing, for the first time, on transcriptomics in addition to genomics. This trial was the signature study of the Worldwide Innovative Network (WIN) consortium (Nature Medicine). She also developed and led some of the first tumor-agnostic cancer clinical trials.

During her time at the University of California San Diego Health, Dr. Kurzrock’s charge was founding and leading the Center for Personalized Cancer Therapy as well as the Experimental Therapeutics program, and she also founded a Rare Tumor Clinic focused on precision medicine. The signature study of the center was the I-PREDICT study (Nature Medicine, 2019) that gave, for the first time, individualized N-of-1 matched combination therapies to patients with lethal malignancies, hence resulting in improved outcomes, and transforming the entire paradigm for oncology treatment. This work was presented at the Nobel Symposium, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden in September 2023.