Dr. Mia Weiss joined the Department of Medicine in the Division of Oncology in August, 2020.
Mia C. Weiss, M.D. is a medical oncologist with clinical interest in the care of patients with localized and metastatic soft tissue and bone sarcomas. She works collaboratively with pathologists, radiation oncologists, and orthopedic surgeons to assess, diagnose, and treat these complex malignancies. She is a member of the American College of Physicians, the American Society of Clinical Oncology, and the Connective Tissue Oncology Society.
Her research interests include clinical trial development to assess efficacy of novel therapies in the treatment of metastatic sarcoma to ultimately improve patient survival and quality of life. She has particular interest related to genomics in sarcoma and finding ways to elucidate which patients are more likely to respond to targeted therapy and why some do not. During her fellowship she established a genomic database of all sarcoma patients at Rush University Medical Center with soft tissue and bone sarcoma who had next generation sequencing obtained on their tumors. Her work showed that a number of patients directly benefited from obtaining genomic sequencing with the ability to target particular driver mutations. Her work was presented at the Musculoskeletal Tumor Society annual meeting in 2019. Dr. Weiss’s research also established that in many cases, in addition to being efficacious, targeted therapy was significantly more tolerable than traditional chemotherapy providing more therapeutic options for patients who would otherwise be poor candidates for traditional cytotoxic chemotherapy. With this in mind, Dr. Weiss developed an interest in working collaboratively with geriatric medicine both to optimize care for older adults with bone and soft tissue sarcoma, and to utilize genomic sequencing to establish clinical trials specifically for this patient population for which therapeutic options can often be limited.
Dr. Weiss has published several articles during her fellowship which most recently included a review on the use of Tazemetostat in epithelioid sarcoma, a novel epigenetic regulator and the first of its kind to be approved in a solid tumor.
Dr. Weiss has been engaged in clinical education since beginning residency at the University of Chicago where she had multiple opportunities to educate medical students and residents while on various services. Most recently as a chief fellow at Rush University Medical Center, Dr. Weiss was directly involved in the teaching of residents and fellows through both didactic and bedside teaching. She was also involved in the orientation and education of new fellows on the hospital’s busy leukemia service. She additionally ran a monthly board review course for the fellowship program. Along with the fellowship program director, Dr. Weiss assisted in revamping the medical oncology curriculum for the fellowship to better meet academic needs which proved very successful.
Additionally, Dr. Weiss has a strong interest in establishing a continuing medical educational program for community based primary care physicians and surgeons related to sarcoma and the importance of referring patients with soft tissue masses to an oncologic surgeon and ideally, a sarcoma center, to ensure optimal outcomes for patients. Dr. Weiss looks forward to continuing a career devoted to patient care, research, and education.