Maria Jasin

Maria Jasin established the foundational principles of targeted gene modification through homologous recombination stimulated by site-specific double-strand breaks in mammalian cells, work that provided the conceptual basis for all CRISPR-mediated gene editing in cancer research. Her laboratory demonstrated that BRCA1 and BRCA2 are essential for homologous recombination repair, explaining why BRCA-mutant cancers are hypersensitive to PARP inhibitors and providing the mechanistic rationale for one of the most successful targeted therapy strategies in oncology. She has elucidated mechanisms of chromosomal translocations in cancer and how DNA repair defects contribute to genomic instability driving tumor evolution.