Lauren Averett Byers, MD, MS is a Professor in the Department of Thoracic/Head and Neck Medical Oncology at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. She completed her B.A. degree in Molecular Biology at Princeton University, her M.D. at Baylor College of Medicine, and M.S. in Patient-Based Research at the University of Texas Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. She is a member of the National Cancer Institute’s Small Cell Lung Cancer (SCLC) Consortium and serves on the NCI’s Thoracic Malignancy Steering Committee and SCLC Working Group.

Dr. Byers’ laboratory is focused on the molecular profiling of SCLC small and the development of new treatments and predictive biomarkers, particularly as they pertain to drugs targeting DNA damage repair (DDR) and immunotherapy. In addition to an outstanding publication record of over 100 peer reviewed manuscripts, Dr. Byers has earned multiple honors including two AACR The Best of AACR Journals Awards, the MD Anderson President’s Recognition for Faculty Excellence - Research Excellence Award, and most recently, membership of The American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI).

As a physician-scientist, her landmark research led to the identification of fundamental differences in the molecular wiring of SCLC, including the identification of PARP1 and other DNA damage repair (DDR) proteins as novel therapeutic targets for SCLC. Building on this, her group also identified a new role of DDR inhibitors in activating the innate immune system, whereby dramatically enhancing response to immune checkpoint blockade in preclinical models. Moving towards the personalization of SCLC treatment, her group has used an un-biased analysis of high-throughput datasets to divide SCLC into four subsets with distinct therapeutic vulnerabilities defined by the expression of, or absence of three transcription factors – ASCL1, NEUROD1, and POU2F3.