New Faculty

Dr. Melissa Reimers joins the Department of Medicine

Dr. Reimers completed her undergraduate training at Washington University in St. Louis with a double major in Biology and German and went on to receive her MD from Saint Louis University in 2013. She then moved to North Carolina for Internal Medicine residency at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Most recently, she completed her Hematology/Oncology fellowship at the University of Michigan where she developed an interest in genitourinary oncology under the mentorship of Dr. Ajjai Alva and Dr. Arul Chinnaiyan. While at Michigan, she led several prostate cancer genomics clinical projects and was a co-author on a recent publication in Cell entitled “Inactivation of CDK12 Delineates a Distinct Immunogenic Class of Advanced Prostate Cancer” (Cell. 2018 Jun 14;173(7):1770-1782.e14). She joined the faculty of the Department of Medicine as an Assistant Professor in the Division of Oncology in August 2019. Dr. Reimers’ clinical interest is in caring for patients with prostate, bladder and kidney cancers, and enrolling them on clinical trials, with the goal of continually advancing the standard of care for these diseases. She is a clinical researcher who will focus her academic efforts on clinical trial design, with a particular focus on precision medicine and immunotherapy trials in prostate cancer. She has continued to lead several projects related to CDK12 mutant prostate cancer, and will serve as site PI at Washington University for a clinical trial she helped develop during her fellowship, “Immunotherapy in Patients With Metastatic Cancers and CDK12 Mutations” (NCT03570619). She has previously presented her work at several national meetings including the Genitourinary Cancers Symposium (2018) and ASCO (2019); in 2018, she was selected for participation in the prestigious AACR/ASCO Vail Methods in Clinical Cancer Research Workshop. She is enthusiastic about teaching medical students, residents and fellows in the clinic and on the inpatient service.