Tomasz Skorski

Tomasz Skorski, MD, PhD, DSc: I serve as the Director of Fels Cancer Institute for Personalized Medicine at Temple University Lewis Katz School of Medicine and as an Associate Director of Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, PA. My laboratory is focused on determination of the role of DNA repair mechanisms in hematological malignancies, including the potential of therapeutic interventions. We found that leukemia cells accumulate potentially lethal DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs), but DNA repair mechanisms protect their survival. However, due to genetic, epigenetic and metabolomic aberrations leukemia cells may employ different DNA repair mechanisms than normal cells. We explore these differences to target leukemia-specific DNA repair mechanisms to achieve synthetic lethality in leukemia cells, with negligible effects on normal cells. These studies will lead to novel therapeutic approaches based on induction of personalized medicine-guided synthetic lethality in leukemias from individual patients.