Paula Cramer is a specialist in internal medicine, hematology and oncology and hemostasis. As attending physician at the Cologne University Hospital in Germany, she works in the hematology outpatient clinic and she heads the consultation service for patients with bleeding disorders and thrombophilia.
Her scientific focus is chronic lymphocytic leukemia: she started working with the German CLL Study Group (DCLLSG) during her medical studies and is now the scientific secretary and a member of the DCLLSG strategy committee. Her doctoral thesis was on the role of comorbidities in CLL. This work was the basis for the use of CIRS score and renal function rather than age for treatment stratification in clinical trials. She is the principal investigator of several investigator-initiated phase-II trials evaluating combinations of targeted agents with an antibody and MRD-guided treatment duration. Based on this work as a clinician scientist, she habilitated in 2022 with the topic "Optimization and individualization of the treatment of chronic lymphocytic leukemia by the use of new targeted agents and investigation of minimal residual disease". She is now leading the international CLL18 phase-III trial with two fixed-duration and one MRD-guided treatment arm with the aim to prove that an individualized treatment duration tailored to the achievement of uMRD is beneficial in the first-line treatment of CLL.