Edward Matthew Schaeffer

I am Chair of the Department of Urology at Feinberg School of Medicine and Program Director of the Genitourinary Oncology Program at the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University. My clinical and research focus is the diagnosis and treatment of men with prostate cancer. I have published more than 250 peer-reviewed publications emphasizing at-risk populations, diagnosis, treatment outcomes, and the molecular biology of lethal prostate cancer. My previous work has demonstrated that aggressive (high-risk), localized prostate cancer is frequently lethal and undertreated. I developed a molecular signature which identifies the most lethal prostate cancers, sometimes upwards of 10 years before the effects of the tumors are observed. I am now taking this work to the next level by modeling which chemotherapies and hormonal therapies could effectively treat these rare, aggressive tumors. My discoveries have greatly advanced the basic scientific understanding of biologic differences in prostate cancers in men of African descent. In recent work, I demonstrated a more aggressive biologic subset of cancers in African American men, which helps to explain why African American men are twice as likely to die from prostate cancer as Caucasian men. My team’s findings include distinctive anatomic locations of tumors in African American patients, molecular expression signatures of cancers in African American patients that demonstrate decreased reliance on androgen signaling, novel solid tumor gene fusions, and divergent biomarker panels signaling aggressive disease. I am continuing this work and hope to identify additional outliers in African American prostate cancers that impact metastatic disease risk.