Tanya Dorff

Tanya Barauskas Dorff, M.D., is a professor in the Department of Medical Oncology & Therapeutics Research and serves as division 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 the 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 serves on the National Comprehensive Cancer Network Prostate Cancer Guidelines Committee and is the co-chair for prostate cancer in the SWOG genitourinary committee.

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 to study ctDNA as a biomarker of minimal residual disease and the impact of the microbiome on treatment outcomes. 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.