Maria Monica Gramatges, MD, PhD
Photo: Maria Gramatges

Interests/specialties:

Resources:

Elected 2022

Dr. Gramatges is an Associate Professor in the Department of Pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine, where she is the Co-Director of the Long-Term Survivor Program and the Associate Chief, Oncology for the Texas Children’s Cancer and Hematology Centers at Texas Children’s Hospital. She is also a member of the leadership team for Passport for Care, a clinical decision support tool that uses evidence-based guidelines to generate personalized Survivorship Care Plans for survivors of childhood cancer and their families.

Dr. Gramatges’s research investigates the relationship between clinical, genetic, and molecular factors and risk for cancer treatment-related acute and long-term outcomes. Her early work clinically and functionally characterized a novel defect in telomerase reverse transcriptase, identified defects in telomere maintenance among children diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia and myelodysplastic syndrome, and showed that shorter germline telomere length at end of leukemia induction predicted longer delays to neutrophil recovery in later chemotherapy cycles (Blood 2013, JCO 2016, Leukemia 2020). Dr. Gramatges’s more recent work focuses on genetic and molecular contributors to risk for late effects in cancer survivorship, as well as factors that underlie outcome disparities in survivor populations. Her key contributions to date in these areas include the study of associations between germline leukocyte telomere length, genetic variation in telomere maintenance genes, and second cancer risk in survivor populations (Clin Cancer Res 2014, PLoS One 2020, Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2019 and 2021). She is currently an MPI for a cohort-building NIH/NCI UG3 grant to establish a large, ethnically-diverse cohort of childhood cancer survivors in Texas. Dr. Gramatges is the 2021 recipient of the American Society of Pediatric Hematology and Oncology Childhood Cancer Survivorship Award for Excellence.