Member, National Academy of Medicine, 2017; Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), 2012; 52nd Annual AACR G.H.A. Clowes Memorial Award, 2012.
Alan D. D'Andrea is an American cancer researcher and the Fuller American Cancer Society Professor of Radiation Oncology at Harvard Medical School. D'Andrea's research at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute focuses on chromosome instability and cancer susceptibility. He is currently the director of the Center for DNA Damage and Repair and the director of the Susan F. Smith Center for Women's Cancer.
The D’Andrea laboratory at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute focuses on the molecular events involved in normal blood cell formation and on the molecular cause of leukemia and other cancers. His laboratory examines molecular signaling pathways and the resulting DNA damage response in mammalian cells. These pathways are often disrupted in cancer cells, accounting for chromosome instability and increased gene mutation frequency in human tumors. D'Andrea and his colleagues have identified and cloned a family of cytokine-inducible deubiquitinating enzymes that regulate hematopoietic cell growth by controlling the ubiquitin-mediated proteolysis of intracellular growth regulatory proteins.[2]
The practical application of D'Andrea's research includes genetic diseases in humans. His primary focus is the molecular pathogenesis of human chromosome instability syndromes: Fanconi anemia (FA), ataxia-telangiectasia (AT), and Bloom syndrome (BS). Most notably, Fanconi anemia is an autosomal-recessive cancer susceptibility disorder characterized by developmental defects and increased cellular sensitivity to DNA crosslinking agents.
D'Andrea's laboratory contributed significantly to the elucidation of a new DNA repair pathway, the FA/BRCA pathway, and demonstrated that one of the FA genes (FANCD1) is identical to the breast cancer gene, BRCA2.[3] Somatic disruption of genes in the FA/BRCA pathway account for the chromosome instability and drug sensitivity of many solid tumors in the general population including breast, ovarian, prostate, and pancreatic cancers.[4]