Kimberly Stegmaier

Kimberly Stegmaier has been instrumental in translating DOT1L inhibition from bench to bedside for MLL-rearranged leukemia, demonstrating that DOT1L-mediated H3K79 methylation is essential for maintaining the leukemic transcription program driven by MLL fusion proteins. Her research using chemical genomic approaches identified DOT1L as a therapeutic vulnerability specific to MLL-rearranged leukemias, which represent a particularly aggressive subset of pediatric and adult acute leukemias. She contributed to the clinical development of pinometostat (EPZ-5676), the first DOT1L inhibitor to enter clinical trials. Her work exemplifies the precision medicine approach to targeting epigenetic dependencies in molecularly defined cancer subsets.