Katherine E. Warren, MD, joins Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s as Clinical Director for Pediatric Neuro-Oncology

June 04, 2019

Katherine E. Warren, MD, has joined Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center as the Clinical Director for Pediatric Neuro-Oncology.

Warren is an internationally recognized expert in pediatric neuro-oncology. Her work focuses on rational, pharmacokinetic-based drug development for children with brain tumors, and she is a leading innovator in developing new means of drug delivery.

“Dr. Warren is a world-renowned clinical researcher and mentor, and we could not be more pleased that she is joining our program,” said David Williams, MD, President of Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s. “We look forward to her continuing and expanding her groundbreaking work here.”

Scott Armstrong, MD, PhD, Chairman of the Department of Pediatric Oncology at Dana-Farber added, “We are quite fortunate to have Dr. Warren join us as the leader of our neuro-oncology program. She brings a wealth of experience and a vision that will help us expand our neuro-oncology clinical program and cutting-edge clinical research.”

She is formerly the head of the Neuro-Oncology Section in the Pediatric Oncology branch of the National Cancer Institute (NCI), where she has overseen an extensive research program for children with brain tumors. Her clinical trials have led the field in exploring new approaches for the treatment of children with these diseases.

“My ultimate goal is to improve both survival and quality of life for children with tumors of the central nervous system by using a rational drug development approach. This means selecting and delivering agents specific for each patient’s tumor, defining active drug concentrations pre-clinically, and determining the feasibility of achieving effective drug levels at the tumor site before going to the clinic. This will reduce the number of patients receiving ineffective therapies or inadequate dosing while preventing excessive dosing and accompanying toxicities that are typically observed in clinical trials,” said Warren.

She continued, “Historically, clinical drug development for children with CNS tumors has relied upon data passed down from adults; pre-clinical studies were not done specifically for pediatric brain tumors because pediatric brain tumor cell lines and animal models did not exist. Now that these are available, we must utilize them in ways that can help optimize clinical trial design. My aim is to replace the drug development paradigm that was developed in the era of cytotoxic chemotherapy with a disease-, drug-, and patient-specific paradigm that will allow for more efficient clinical trials while improving outcome for each patient.”

Warren received her medical degree from Tufts University School of Medicine and is a member of a number of professional societies and has numerous publications to her credit.