News & Events: Prognostic Molecular Assay for NSCLC

UCSF surgeon-scientist Johannes R. Kratz, M.D. was awarded a Junior Clinical Investigator Award from the Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Care Center. This mentored award is given to a junior clinical investigator to support their research efforts in the early stages of their career. Dr. Kratz was given this prestigious award to pursue the study of the tumor immune microenvironment in high-risk early-stage lung cancer.   The Kratz lab focuses on the genetic and immunological mechanisms that drive early-stage, surgically resectable thoracic malignancies. These malignancies include lung [...]

"Looking at the genomic aspect of tumors allows us to get deeper than just looking at the microscopic appearance of the tumor and see how aggressive they are biologically," said Johannes Kratz, MD, FACS, director of minimally invasive and robotic thoracic surgery at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) and coauthor of the study that was published in December 2019 in JAMA Network Open. "We can make a more accurate prediction of which patients will recur and better predict survival." Dr Kratz said that incorporating molecular analyses to determine patients' prognoses helps address [...]

UCSF surgeon-scientist Johannes R. Kratz, M.D. has been awarded the Michael DeBakey Research Scholarship by the American Association for Thoracic Surgery (AATS) and AATS Foundation. This two-year research scholarship is awarded annually to a single North American surgeon committed to pursuing an academic career in cardiothoracic surgery. Dr. Kratz was given this prestigious award for the study of genetic and immunologic determinants of recurrent early-stage lung cancer. The Kratz Lab focuses on the genetic and immunological mechanisms that drive early-stage, surgically resectable thoracic [...]

Despite adoption of molecular biomarkers in the management of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), the recently adopted 8th Edition staging utilized only clinicopathologic characteristics, and validated improvement in risk stratification of early-stage disease remains elusive. We therefore evaluated the integration of a clinically-validated molecular prognostic classifier into conventional staging.... Incorporation of a molecular prognostic classifier significantly improved identification of high-risk patients and survival predictions compared to conventional staging. TNMB may lead to [...]

UCSF surgeon-scientist Johannes R. Kratz, M.D. was awarded the Inaugural Hellman Family Clinical-Translational Research Development Award from the Bakar ImmunoX initiative. This development award embeds a young investigator in an ImmunoX CoLab for two years in order to rapidly translate clinical insights into molecular-level understanding of disease. Dr. Kratz was given this prestigious award for the study of tumor immune populations in high-risk early-stage lung cancer.   The Kratz Lab focuses on the genetic and immunological mechanisms that drive early-stage, surgically resectable [...]

The Thoracic Oncology Program proudly announces the launch of the Kratz Lab, which will focus on understanding the genetic and immunological mechanisms that drive early-stage, surgically resectable thoracic malignancies, most notably non-small cell lung cancer. The translationally-focused Kratz Lab will use the knowledge gained from investigating these mechanisms to identify novel therapeutic targets and treatments for this group of patients.  Johannes R. Kratz, M.D., assistant professor in the Division of Adult Cardiothoracic Surgery and Van Auken Endowed Chair in Thoracic Oncology, is the [...]

Johannes R. Kratz, M.D. has been named the new Van Auken Endowed Chair in Thoracic Oncology. Kratz is an assistant professor in the Division of Adult Cardiothoracic Surgery, a member of the Thoracic Oncology Program, and director of Advanced Minimally Invasive Thoracic Surgery.  The Van Auken Endowed Chair supports research, teaching and service in the field of thoracic oncology. Kratz has excelled in all three areas. As a research fellow at UCSF, he was instrumental in the development of a prognostic assay for early-stage lung cancer, working on a team led by David M. Jablons, [...]

The Department of Surgery welcomes Johannes R. Kratz, M.D. to the faculty as Assistant Professor in the Division of Adult Cardiothoracic Surgery and member of the Thoracic Oncology Program. Dr. Kratz was a surgical research fellow in the UCSF Thoracic Oncology Laboratory from 2008-2011 where he played a key role in the research leading to the development of a prognostic assay for early-stage lung cancer by a team led by David M. Jablons, M.D. and Michael Mann, M.D., a test now in widespread clinical use. He returned to UCSF in 2014, completing his advanced training as a clinical fellow in [...]

Building on earlier retrospective validation studies, a team of Thoracic Oncology Program researchers, demonstrated in a small prospective study the clinical utility of a 14-gene expression assay in stratifying risk among non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients. In a recently published paper in the journal Clinical Lung Cancer, lead author Gavitt Woodard, M.D., a general surgery research resident in the Thoracic Oncology Laboratory, and coauthors  David M. Jablons, M.D. (pictured second) and Michael Mann, M.D., (pictured 3rd) began  to address a key question regarding widespread use of [...]

Building on their  earlier work reported in The Lancet, two UCSF thoracic surgeons   David M. Jablons, M.D. (left) and   Michael Mann, M.D. (middle), and  Johannes Kratz, M.D. (right) a former surgical resident in the  Thoracic Oncology Lab, showed they could accurately stratify patients even with the earliest stage of lung cancer into groups at low-, intermediate- or high-risk of death based solely on the activity of 14 different genes found in their tumors. The group analyzed lung  tumors of patients diagnosed as Stage 1A  (T1a node-negative non-small-cell lung cancers (NSCLC)), the [...]

In the two largest clinical studies ever conducted on the molecular genetics of lung cancer, an international team, led by UCSF thoracic surgeons David M. Jablons, M.D. and Michael Mann, M.D., demonstrated that a 14-gene prognostic molecular assay better predicted the likelihood of death in early-stage lung cancer  patients versus conventional staging guidelines. Johannes Kratz, M.D., a former surgical resident in the  Thoracic Oncology Laboratory, helped spearhead the  development of the assay and was lead author of a paper published in The Lancet discussing the results. John Minna, M.D.", [...]