Christine Eyler, MD, PhD, is one of six School of Medicine faculty members to win a 2021 Physician Scientist "Strong Start" Award. The Strong Start program funds early-career physician-scientists as they develop their research. Dr. Eyler will receive $75,000 annually for three years.
“My research interests focus on the evolution of genomic and epigenomic features in rectal cancers treated with chemoradiotherapy and how treatment-induced evolutionary trends may reveal new tumor sensitivities,” said Dr. Eyler. “This award will support my efforts to validate rectal cancer organoid cultures as models of treatment-induced tumor evolution, and will also support complementary genome-scale genetic and drug screens in rectal cancer cellular models to identify new evolutionarily-determined treatment sensitivities. I aim to harness treatment-induced tumor evolution to identify novel sensitivities that can ultimately improve neoadjuvant treatment for rectal cancer.”
Dr. Eyler joined Duke Radiation Oncology on August 1, 2020. She received her BS from Duke University and her MD and PhD from Duke University School of Medicine and Duke University Graduate School. She completed her residency at the Harvard Radiation Oncology Program and was on the faculty at the Massachusetts General Hospital from July 2017 to 2020. At Duke, Dr. Eyler joined the lab of Kris Wood, PhD, and also works with Joseph Salama, MD, and colleagues at the Durham VA Medical Center.
Read the SOM post, or watch Dean Klotman's announcement.