Irene Ghobrial

Irene Ghobrial is an American-Egyptian physician who is a professor at the Dana–Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, where her research investigates early detection, mechanisms of disease progression and early interception of multiple myeloma. She is interested in why certain patients with monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance (MGUS) and smoldering multiple myeloma (SMM) develop multiple myeloma.

Dr. Ghobrial is the Senior Vice President for Experimental Medicine, Director of the Center for Early Detection and Interception of Blood Cancers, Director of the Ghobrial Lab, Co-Leader of the Lymphoma/Myeloma Cancer Center Program, and Professor of Medicine at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School.

Early life and education
Ghobrial lived in Nigeria for 13 years during her childhood and moved to Egypt and studied medicine at Cairo University. After graduating, she moved to Detroit, where she completed her specialist training at Wayne State University. In 2000, she moved to the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN, where she worked with Robert A. Kyle as a fellow in hematology and oncology.

Research and career
Dr. Ghobrial is a physician-scientist who specializes in multiple myeloma and Waldenström macroglobulinemia, specifically in the precursor conditions of monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance (MGUS) and smoldering myeloma.

Her clinical and laboratory research focuses on understanding mechanisms of disease progression from early precursor conditions, including monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance (MGUS) and smoldering myeloma (SMM) to overt multiple myeloma,  Multiple Myeloma (MM). She aims to disrupt the cancer care model in myeloma by leading screening for early detection, developing novel biomarkers for risk stratification, and disrupting the treatment paradigm with innovative clinical trials in smoldering myeloma.

Until recently, the standard of care for precursor myeloma was observation and monitoring. Her team is interested in understanding the factors that allow for disease progression and translating that into early therapeutic interventions that could improve the outcomes for MM patients or prevent MM from developing in the first place.

To achieve this, she initiated the Center for Early Detection and Interception of Blood Cancers, where patients with precursor conditions such as MGUS, early myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS), and early chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) undergo sample collection and are monitored prospectively for the prevention of clonal evolution and disease progression.

She developed a large, patient-empowering observational study for precursor conditions (PCROWD study) that has recruited over 4,000 patients with samples acquired at several time points during disease progression. Her efforts in the precursor field allowed us to initiate the first screening study for MGUS/SMM in the US. This study, named PROMISE, is currently screening 30,000 individuals at high risk of developing myeloma, including African Americans and first-degree relatives of patients with myeloma.

Her team was one of the first to examine genomic alterations in both the bone marrow tumor cells and circulating tumor cells (CTCs) during disease progression from MGUS/SMM to myeloma. She recently demonstrated with single-cell sequencing that alterations in immune cell regulation occur as early as MGUS and continue with specific immune cell alterations during disease progression from MGUS to myeloma (add ref).

Her passion is to rapidly translate laboratory findings to the clinic. She has led over 15 investigator-initiated clinical trials and now focus on developing multiple precision interception approaches in MGUS and SMM, mostly focusing on immunotherapy. She is the principal investigator of the first bispecific and the first CAR-T trials to be examined in asymptomatic precursor Myeloma. These studies are already demonstrating unprecedented responses which can disrupt the way we treat myeloma by early disease interception instead of the current standard of care.

In 2010, she received the Robert A. Kyle Award for research in WM. In 2011, Ghobrial was elected to the American Society for Clinical Investigation. In 2014, she received mentor of the year award at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. In 2017, she received the Ken Anderson  Basic and Translational Research Award from the International Myeloma Society for an outstanding investigator under the age of 40. In 2018, she was awarded $10 million from Stand Up to Cancer to establish the Multiple Myeloma Dream Team, which looks to understand the precursors that indicate a risk of developing myeloma. In 2022, she also earned a National Cancer Institute Outstanding Investigator Award for her ongoing progressive research[AJ2]. She received the Jan Gosta Waldenstrom award in 2022 [AJ3] for her research in precursor B-cell malignancies. In 2022, Ghobrial was awarded the William Dameshek Prize from the American Society of Hematology for her scientific contribution to the field of early detection and interception of hematological malignancies.

In January 2024, The Harvard Crimson reported that Ghobrial, as well as three scientists at the Dana Faber Cancer Institute, have been accused of research misconduct and data falsification. However, corrections have been made to her publications with no retractions and the errata did not affect the scientific integrity of the research conducted in those studies. She continues to focus her work on the area of early detection and interception in myeloma.

In March 2024, she served on the ODAC committee and helped with the approval of CiltaCel (Carvykti) in the second line of therapy of Multiple Myeloma. In April 2024, she was featured in the Scientist ebook (the sequencing revolution) about monitoring multiple myeloma progression through sequencing. She developed with Gad Getz a new method   termed MinimMM-seq that can replace the use of bone marrow biopsies and FISH technology for the diagnosis and prognosis of multiple myeloma.