A L U M N I P R O F I L E Janice Mehnert, MD ’01 H B Y L Y N D A e r c h o i c e o f s p e c i a l i z a t i o n w a s inspired in part by a Yale University physician she trained with who died of melanoma at age 47. Mount Sinai Hospital, New York, and then moved northeast to New Haven, where she pursued fellowship training in hematology and oncology at the Yale Cancer Center. In her current position, Dr. Mehnert focuses on translating new discoveries into clinical trials, working in the laboratory as well as the clinic. Her work focuses on ways to exploit the process of autophagy in the development of new cancer treatments. When tumors are stressed out because of oxygen deprivation, chemotherapy, or radiation, a spore-like state occurs—autophagy— that allows tumors to survive and develop resistance to anticancer therapies. If this spore-like state can be inhibited, tumor cell death may be accelerated, possibly improving clinical outcomes. Through grants from the V Foundation for Cancer Research and the National Cancer Institute, Dr. Mehnert is utilizing laboratory models to explore how autophagy supports melanoma tumorigenesis and using these results to develop clinical trials for But Janice Mehnert, MD ’01, associate professor of medicine at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, was first drawn to the research and science behind oncology when she was in medical school, beginning with a year she spent in translational research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as part of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute–NIH Research Scholars Program. She is a now a tenuretrack medical oncologist at the Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey, where her practice is dedicated to patients with soft-tissue and skin cancers—such as sarcoma, melanoma, and squamous cell cancers—that are aggressive and advanced. Dr. Mehnert completed her undergraduate work at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, before enrolling at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. She went on to complete her internal medicine residency at R U D O L P H patients with advanced cancers. “This is a burgeoning area—we’re at the very ground level in this research,” says Dr. Mehnert. This work is being conducted in collaboration with Eileen White, PhD, associate director for basic science and leader, Cell Death and Survival Signaling Research Program. Dr. White is also a distinguished professor of molecular biology and biochemistry in the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University. In addition to her investigatorinitiated work, Dr. Mehnert has enjoyed being part of the wave of new therapies recently developed for patients with advanced melanoma, a disease that is very difficult to treat. In the past three years, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved emerging treatments for melanoma in two classes: targeted therapies and immunotherapies. With targeted therapies, the genetic profiles of tumors from individual patients guide therapy selection. Immunotherapies inhibit blocks known as checkpoints that function as brakes within the immune system, so that the patient’s own immune system may be mobilized to fight the cancer. 60 Robert Wood Johnson I MEDICINE