Developmental Cancer Therapeutics Research Program

Nancy Klauber-DeMore, M.D. is the Director, Medical Scientist Training Program; Co-Leader Developmental Cancer Therapeutics, Hollings Cancer Center and the BMW Endowed Chair in Cancer Research at the Medical University of South Carolina. Dr. Klauber-DeMore has extensive research experience in developing new therapies for breast cancer that have led to clinical advances in patient care, particularly for those with metastatic disease. She has been a principal or co-investigator on more than 30 active and completed clinical trials and has contributed to five patents or patents pending. She is also developing novel surgical devices to aid in breast surgery.

Dr. DeMore is also a physician-scientist with extensive research experience in developing new therapies for breast cancer. For more than 25 years, she has investigated tumor angiogenesis. Her lab focuses on discovering novel factors that stimulate the growth of new capillary blood vessels that provide tumors with oxygen and nutrients with a goal of developing new drugs to block these factors, therefore inhibiting tumor growth.

Dr. DeMore received her medical degree from the University of Health Sciences/The Chicago Medical School. She then completed General Surgery Residency at Boston University, followed by a surgical research fellowship at Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and a Surgical Oncology Fellowship at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

The focus of my research is on defining new vulnerabilities in the RAS oncoprotein. Although RAS has been studied for more than 40 years, pharmacologics targeting oncogenic KRAS have been difficult to develop. While great strides have been made in recent years in developing anti-RAS therapeutics, leading compounds target only a single oncogenic mutant, KRAS(G12C) which represents only 15% of oncogenic KRAS mutants in human cancers. My laboratory employs Monobody technology to discover new vulnerabilities in RAS that can be targeted for therapeutic inhibition.