Nancy Dumont, Ph.D.

Nancy Dumont is a senior group leader and research scientist in the Center for the Development of Therapeutics (CDoT) at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Working with the director of translational pharmacology and senior CDoT leadership, Dumont is responsible for defining and driving execution of the in vivo strategy to support a growing portfolio of drug discovery projects, including oncology and non-oncology therapeutic areas. Her focus is to understand the pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic activities of low molecular weight compounds to drive drug development milestones. She also participates in the review of new target proposals and contributes to the development of early stage target validation and drug discovery research plans.

Dumont joined the Broad Institute in March 2017, initially as the in vivo target discovery and advancement lead for the Cancer Dependency Map project. She moved into her current position in November 2019. In her previous post at the Broad, she led the in vivo validation efforts for the top prioritized targets emerging from functional genomic screens, the aims of which are to identify novel cancer dependencies that are amenable to therapeutic targeting. She also led validation efforts for the top candidates emerging from drug sensitivity screens, the aims of which are to repurpose existing non-oncology drugs for the treatment of cancer. She has also been designing and executing in vivo CRISPR screens for target identification, prioritization, and validation.

Prior to joining the Broad, Dumont worked for four years at Merrimack Pharmaceuticals in Cambridge, MA, where she was responsible for designing and executing preclinical studies to inform clinical decision-making for an antibody-targeted nanoliposome that was being evaluated in a clinical trial for the treatment of metastatic breast cancer. She had previously served as an assistant researcher in the Department of Pathology at the University of California, San Francisco, after completing her postdoctoral fellowship there. During her time at UCSF, she developed in vitro and in vivo assays to examine how the fibroblast and matrix components of the breast microenvironment contribute to early dissemination, tumorigenesis, and metastasis, and published data that challenge the prevailing view that dissemination and metastasis are late events in tumor progression.

Dumont obtained a Ph.D. in cancer biology at Vanderbilt University. Her dissertation in the lab of Carlos Arteaga focused on the role of autocrine TGF-beta signaling in breast cancer. She also holds a B.S. and M.S. in physiology from McGill University in Montreal.

Contact Nancy Dumont via email at ndumont@broadinstitute.org.