Dr. Alumkal is the Leader of the Prostate/Genitourinary Oncology Section and Associate Division Chief for Basic Research in the Heme-Onc Division of the Department of Internal Medicine at the Rogel Cancer Center at the University of Michigan.  Dr. Alumkal attended the University of Texas (UT) at Austin and then Baylor College of Medicine. He completed internal medicine residency training at UT Southwestern Medical Center, where he also served as Chief Resident. He completed medical oncology training at Johns Hopkins University.

The Alumkal Laboratory’s main emphasis is to understand how genomic and epigenomic changes contribute to lethal prostate cancer progression. They use biochemical, genomic, and epigenomic approaches in cellular models to clarify mechanisms by which key transcriptional regulators function.

The most important goals of Dr. Alumkal’s studies are to identify therapies that effectively target and interdict lethal prostate cancer progression and to conduct innovative clinical trials designed to validate the molecular and clinical effectiveness of novel therapeutic agents. His laboratory was the first to demonstrate the anti-tumor activity of BET bromodomain inhibition in prostate cancer—results that inform a first in man phase I trial that he leads. His laboratory recently demonstrated that the histone demethylase lysine specific demethylase 1 (LSD1) promotes prostate cancer cell survival independently of its canonical demethylase function and that blocking key LSD1 protein-protein interactions is a promising new strategy. Finally, his ongoing work seeks to clarify mechanisms of resistance to the androgen receptor-targeting agent enzalutamide in order to develop precision medicine strategies for men with specific molecular subsets of enzalutamide-resistant, lethal prostate cancer.