Razelle Kurzrock

Razelle (Ray) Kurzrock, MD, is a world-renowned physician-scientist leader in precision medicine as well as in novel cancer therapeutics development. Currently, she is Professor of Medicine and Director at Center for Precision Oncology and Rare Cancers at MCW Cancer Center, Medical College of Wisconsin in USA.

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 (five countries) trial focusing, for the first time, on transcriptomics in addition to genomics. She also developed and pioneered some of the first tumor-agnostic cancer clinical trials and is recognized as having led the way for the molecular reclassification of cancer.

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 that gave, for the first time, individualized N-of-1 matched combination therapies to patients with lethal malignancies. This work was presented at the Nobel Symposium, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden in September 2023.

Dr. Kurzrock has performed key early-phase studies of 8 drugs that have gone on to FDA approval. Dr. Kurzrock also served on the Board of Directors and was elected to the Executive Committee for NCCN and more recently she has served as Chair of the Early Therapeutics and Rare Cancers Committee, for NCI/SWOG. Dr. Kurzrock is the author of >1000 peer-reviewed articles on PubMed, with a Hirsch index (h-index) score of 152, with ~100,000 citations.