Barbara Jarząb - Biography#

Professor Barbara Jarząb is a Polish endocrinologist and nuclear medicine specialist at the Department of Nuclear Medicine and Endocrine Oncology, Maria Skłodowska-Curie National Research Institute of Oncology, Gliwice Branch, Poland, which is a tertiary reference and the largest center for thyroid cancer in Poland. She is a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Committee for Human Genetics and Molecular Pathology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. She is the president of the Polish Group of Endocrine Tumors, within the Polish Society of Endocrinology and National Coordinator of rare endocrine conditions within the European Reference Network on Rare Endocrine Conditions.

Professor Jarzab is involved in the research on the functional genomics of endocrine tumors, focusing on gene expression profiling of thyroid cancer and genetic predisposition to medullary and non-medullary thyroid carcinoma. The article “Gene expression profile of papillary thyroid cancer: sources of variability and diagnostic implications” (Cancer Res. 2005), cited many times, was one of the first such studies published on thyroid cancer. Based on these experiences, she analyzed, under the international consortium “Genrisk T”, the gene expression profile of radiation-induced differentiated thyroid cancer and continues these studies with cooperation with bioinformaticians and mathematicians. She was also the Coordinator of the Polish multidisciplinary consortium, which implemented DNA microarray technologies in the analysis of cancer transcriptome. Her role was to head project related to the development of thyroid cancer gene expression classifier adjusted to the Polish epidemiological conditions. She initiated a multicenter clinical study to verify its clinical usefulness and proved that the frequency of inherited disease among apparent sporadic medullary thyroid carcinoma patients is close to 10% (J Clin Oncol, 2001). Main clinical activities are related to implementation of molecular biology into diagnostics and personalized treatment of thyroid cancer (molecular and imaging prognostic and predictive markers), radioiodine therapy of differentiated thyroid cancers and multikinase inhibitors in advanced thyroid cancer.

Professor Jarząb served as a Secretary of the European Society of Endocrinology, Secretary of the European Thyroid Association – Cancer Research Network, and she was a member of the European Thyroid Association Executive Board. She is an author of around 330 articles listed in PubMed, including 100 papers during within the last 5 years. Her Hirsch Index is 51 (Web of Science).