Clara Hwang, MD

I specialize in Prostate Cancer and Genitourinary Cancer. 

I am a medical oncologist with an interest in cancers of the prostate, bladder, kidney, and testes. My research is currently focused on the understanding why prostate cancer is resistant to chemotherapy and applying this knowledge to the care of patients with metastatic prostate cancer. 

Death from prostate cancer is driven by metastatic spread, as cancer grows beyond the prostate and throughout the body. Docetaxel is one of the primary chemotherapy drugs available to treat this deadly form of prostate cancer and was the first chemotherapy for metastatic prostate cancer that helped people to live longer. Docetaxel can result in dramatic improvements for some patients, even after other treatments stop working. However, we still do not completely understand why docetaxel stops working, or why it does not work at all for half the patients who take it. Because we are currently unable to predict how patients will respond to docetaxel, the majority of metastatic prostate cancer patients will be treated with this chemotherapy, even if they would have been better off with a different treatment or no treatment at all.

My current research focus is to find the genes that are responsible for the differences in how patients respond to docetaxel. Our research will provide information about why docetaxel works for some but not all patients, so that we can determine in advance who will benefit from the drug and who will not.  For those patients who do not benefit, we will learn more about why so that alternative treatments can be found. We hope to help patients with metastatic prostate cancer, a stage of the disease with no known cure and limited treatment options. The first way we anticipate being able to help patients is by telling them their individual chance of responding to docetaxel treatment on the basis of their cancer gene expression. Predicting response to therapy will help doctors and patients make better treatment choices by more quickly matching patients to drugs that work for them. More importantly, we believe that understanding why chemotherapy treatment stops working will enable scientists and physicians to find new treatments for prostate cancer and make current treatments more effective.

Awards and Honors

Professional Societies:

2008-present Michigan Society of Hematology/Oncology
2008-present Southwest Oncology Group
2006-present American Association for Cancer Research
2005-present American Society of Clinical Oncology

2008  Walther Cancer Institute Durant Fellowship
1997-1999 Howard Hughes Medical Student Research Fellow
1996  SPORE Development Award
1996  NIH Student Biomedical Research grant
1993-1995 Susan Evarts Herman Scholar
1991  Harvard National Schola