Catriona Jamieson, MD, PhD

Catriona Jamieson, MD, PhD, is a board-certified hematologist with broad clinical expertise in caring for patients with hematologic malignancies. As hematology team leader for the Division of Hematology/Oncology at UC San Diego Health Moores Cancer Center, Dr. Jamieson's clinical interests include the treatment of myeloproliferative neoplasms including chronic myeloid leukemia (CML), polycythemia vera (PV), myelofibrosis and essential thrombocythemia. She is also the principal investigator on several clinical trials for the treatment of these and related bone marrow disorders.

As a physician-scientist, Dr. Jamieson completed her residency and clinical fellowships in bone marrow transplantation and hematology, as well as a postdoctoral research fellowship in the laboratory of Professor Irving Weissman at Stanford. Together with collaborators, she discovered in 2004 that chronic phase CML is initiated by blood-forming stem cells through expression of the BCR-ABL gene, but that a patient's transition to the blast crisis stage of CML is driven by myeloid progenitors that have been reprogrammed to behave like leukemia stem cells (LSC) through aberrant activation of the gene beta-catenin (Jamieson et al., The New England Journal of Medicine 2004).

In her own laboratory first at Moores Cancer Center, and now also at the Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine, she has expanded this research to include analysis of the events involved in the initiation and progression of a variety of blood cancers. As a principal investigator on several research grants funded by the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), Dr. Jamieson has a deep interest in understanding the mechanisms fueling the development, progression and therapeutic resistance of hematologic malignancies. Her translational research efforts have led to discovery of small molecule therapeutic inhibitors that are now being tested in two Phase 1 clinical trials for two different blood cancers. A successful, recently completed Phase l clinical trial showed promising results for myelofibrosis. The continued aims of her research group focus on developing novel therapeutic strategies for hematological malignancies that will improve the quality of life of people with these disorders, with the goal of developing curative therapies that will obviate therapeutic resistance and disease relapse.

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For more information see Blood Disorder Care and Moores Cancer Center.