Dr. Tanya Dorff

Tanya Barauskas Dorff, M.D., F.A.S.C.O., 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 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.

After nearly 10 years on faculty at USC, Dr. Dorff joined City of Hope in 2018 and has published over 152 peer-reviewed manuscripts in top-tier journals, including Nature Medicine, Lancet Oncology, and Journal of Clinical Oncology. She has been invited to speak at multiple national and international meetings, and serves on the National Comprehensive Cancer Network Prostate Cancer Guidelines Committee and 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). With funding from NCI and PCF she has led a trial adding PARP inhibitor therapy to doublet hormone therapy for patients with metastatic hormone sensitive prostate cancer, actively leads trials through SWOG and NRG cooperative groups, in addition to leading multiple phase 1 first-in-human trials in partnership with industry.

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.

With an overarching goal of providing access to the most promising new therapeutics and innovative treatment strategies, Dr. Dorff leads the national City of Hope genitourinary disease team and aspires to expand access to the robust clinical trial portfolio to multiple City of Hope locations.