Francine Foss, MD

• Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia

Francine Foss, MD, professor of medicine in the Section of Medical Oncology at the Yale Cancer Center, is an internationally recognized clinician and clinical researcher with expertise in adult lymphomas and in stem cell allotransplantation. She has derived and tested therapies that have been used to treat thousands of cancer patients, and her research has potential to substantially impact the field of stem cell research, benefiting patients at Yale and around the world. Dr Foss has brought a nationally established clinical trials program to the Yale Cancer Center.

In her previous post at Tufts New England Medical Center in Boston, she designed, initiated and directed multi-center national clinical trials which led to FDA approval of several novel therapies for lymphomas. One of these, Interleukin-2 conjugated to Diphtheria toxin, was the first FDA-approved fusion biologic drug to be approved for use in the United States. She also developed a treatment for patients undergoing allogeneic stem cell transplant that reduced the development of graft-versus-host disease. These findings led to the initiation of two National Cancer Institute-sponsored trials to confirm these results in patients with lymphoma and myelodysplastic syndrome.

Dr Foss is a world expert in T cell Lymphomas. She has pioneered several novel therapies for T cell lymphomas and has led a number of national studies. She is currently overseeing a national registry for T cell lymphomas and is a founder and co-chairman of the T CELL Forum, the preeminent international T cell lymphoma research meeting. She is a founder of the United States Cutaneous Lymphoma Consortium and the Peripheral T cell Consortium. She has been a translational researcher in T cell Lymphomas and currently is collaborating with a number of laboratories at Yale to identify molecular targets in T cell Lymphoma.