Research Abstract

Dr. Deborah Schrag is medical oncologist and a health services researcher at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. She is Chief of the Division of Population Sciences and a Professor at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Schrag is a clinician with longstanding focus on gastrointestinal cancers, particularly colorectal cancer. She is currently the Principal Investigator of the PROSPECT trial, a National Cancer Institute phase III clinical trial in locally advanced rectal cancer. For 30 years, radiation has been a mainstay of treatment for rectal cancer and this study seeks to examine if patients can be effectively treated with personalized strategies that employ radiation only if chemotherapy proves to be ineffective. This trial is open at more than 300 sites in the US and internationally. Dr. Schrag is a leader in the development of systems to integrate patient reported outcomes into both clinical trials and routine oncology care. A major focus of her work is on developing strategies to better integrate the patient perspective in understanding the effectiveness and toxicity of cancer treatments. She is currently working across multiple cancer centers to develop capacity for reliable measurement of “Real World” clinical outcomes to gain knowledge from cancer patients who receive treatment outside the clinical trial context. Dr. Schrag is a fellow of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, an elected member of the Association of American Physicians and an Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association.