D’Andrea is the Fuller-American Cancer Society Professor of Radiation Oncology at Harvard Medical School, the Director of the Center for DNA Damage and Repair, and the Director of the Susan F. Smith Center for Women’s Cancers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He is internationally recognized for his BRCA research, and his work is leading to significant improvements in drug development and in clinical care for BRCA-related cancers.

D’Andrea is known for unraveling the Fanconi Anemia/BRCA pathway. His laboratory made the extraordinary discovery that proteins encoded by the Fanconi Anemia genes—which are associated with rare inherited bone marrow failure syndromes—act in a common pathway that intersects with BRCA1 and BRCA2. Biomarkers for this pathway have contributed significantly to the development of new anti-cancer drugs, such as PARP inhibitors. He also discovered two critical DNA repair targets, POLQ and USP1,  required for the growth of BRCA1 or BRCA2-deficient tumors, leading to the development of new inhibitors currently being tested in clinical trials.

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