Franziska Wachter, MD

Dr. Wachter is a physician-scientist committed to combining compassionate, leading-edge care of malignancies with groundbreaking research in experimental therapeutics.  She obtained her MD from Ludwig Maximillans University, Munich, Germany and graduated summa cum laude from Irmela Jeremia's laboratory, where she studied mechanisms of chemoresistance and the influence of p53 reactivation responses to the extrinsic apoptotic pathway agonist TRAIL.  

She then continued her training in Loren Walensky's laboratory, which focuses on interrogating BCL-2 family protein biology through the lens of structural and chemical biology.  Dr. Wachter's particular areas of study comprised investigating inhibitory mechanisms of the pro-apoptotic effector protein BAX as well as identifying and characterizing BAX activators identified in an NMR-based fragment screen.  She also validated the on-target mechanism of a p53 reactivating stapled peptide drug.  Currently, she continues her postdoc scientific training in Eric Fischer's laboratory co-mentored by Scott Armstrong and use modern structural biology methods and biochemistry with the goal to structurally define aberrant transcription in myeloid children with high-risk myeloid malignancies.

Dr. Wachter attends on the pediatric stem cell transplant service, and her clinical interest is to improve outcomes for pediatric AML and MDS after stem cell transplant.  Her clinical research efforts focus on the role of novel therapeutics in the treatment of high-risk acute myeloid leukemia, with a special focus on disease control prior to hematopoietic stem cell transplant (HCT) and maintenance treatment after HCT to reduce the risk of relapse.