NHLBI Celebrates Women Scientists

Mary Horowitz, M.D., M.S.

March 31, 2019

Mary Horowitz, M.D., M.S., has not only witnessed the evolution of the blood and marrow transplantation field; she also has been critical in its advancement. Horowitz is chief scientific director of the Center for International Blood and Marrow Transplant Research (CIBMTR) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. As a recognized leader in transplant research, she oversees the center’s large and extensive research database of clinical outcomes for transplant patients. This unique resource for the medical and scientific community holds data from over 475,000 patients and has helped inform the research leading to more than 1,000 scientific publications. Investigators throughout the United States look to the center as an authority on clinical study design and implementation, in part because of its broad connections.

The CIBMTR leads the Coordinating Center of the Blood and Marrow Transplant Clinical Trials Network (BMT CTN), a national, multi-center clinical trials group that built the first infrastructure in 2001 to prospectively evaluate therapies to improve transplant outcomes. And with Horowitz’s leadership and the help of CIBMTR’s large database and scientific expertise, the BMT CTN is now doing that work. It has even tackled determining outcomes of transplantation for rare disease with much success. Under Horowitz’s guidance, the CIBMTR is gearing up for the era of precision medicine, which will require that it better understands the roles of the immune system and donor and recipient genome variation in transplantation. The center will also continue its important role in maintaining long-term follow-up of patients who have received transplants.

“We have studied thousands of transplant recipients who had their procedures more than 15 years ago and identified areas where better prevention and treatment are critically needed,” Horowitz said. “CIBMTR studies were key in highlighting the risk of secondary cancers and other complications from transplant procedures. We are now assessing outcomes from the patient perspective with a large initiative to capture patient-reported outcomes from transplant survivors. So, the center will have a very important role in the field of blood and marrow transplantation in years to come.”