About the Editors
Editor-in-Chief
Trever Bivona MD, PhD
Prof. of Medicine and Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology
University of California, San Francisco
CA, USA
Dr. Bivona is a laboratory-based physician scientist at the University of California, San Francisco. He is a cancer biologist who leads a research program focused on signal transduction and cancer genetics and the molecular basis of tumor initiation, progression, and drug resistance. A major area of interest is the function and therapeutic targeting of oncogenic receptor tyrosine kinases and RAS. The goal of this research program is to understand the regulatory principles underlying cancer cell signaling and tumor evolution to improve cancer therapy and patient survival. He is an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation.
Deputy Editors
Collin M Blakely, MD, PhD
University of California San Francisco
San Francisco, CA, USA
Dr. Blakely is a clinical/translational scientist and thoracic medical oncologist at the University of California, San Francisco. His research focuses on defining how targeted therapy resistance in lung cancer evolves at the tumor genome and transcriptome levels as well as through tumor interactions with the microenvironment. He has translated these findings into multiple clinical trials testing rational companion therapies that can prevent, delay, or overcome targeted therapy resistance. He has received several awards for his research including the Damon Runyon Clinical Investigator Award, the Doris Duke Clinical Scientist Award, and the V Scholar Award.
Priscilla Brastianos, MD
Director, Central Nervous System Metastatis Center/Associate Professor, Harvard Medical School
Massachusetts General Hospital
Massachusetts, USA
Originally from Vancouver, BC, Dr. Priscilla Brastianos completed her medical school and internal medicine residency at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and fellowship training in hematology/oncology and neuro-oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital. She is now director of the Central Nervous System Metastasis Center at Massachusetts General Hospital and leads a multi-R01-funded laboratory. Dr. Brastianos’ research focuses on understanding the genomic mechanisms that drive primary and metastatic brain tumors. She has lead studies which have identified novel therapeutic targets in brain tumors, and she has translated her scientific findings to national multicenter trials. She also leads a multidisciplinary central nervous system metastasis clinic at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School. She has received a number of awards for her work including a ‘NextGen Star’ award by the American Association for Cancer Research, a Damon Runyon Clinical Investigator Award, a Breast Cancer Research Foundation Award, a Susan G. Komen Career Catalyst Award, the American Brain Tumor Association Joel Gingras Award and the Anne Klibanski Award for Excellence in Mentorship.
Managing Editor
Alexandra Willis, PhD
Alex gained her PhD at Imperial College, exploring new ways to fight infection. Approaches included reprogramming haematopoietic stem cells and even predatory bacteria. After graduating, Alex spent 4 years in Canada as a postdoc at the University of Toronto studying parasitic infection and inherited immunity. She moved into publishing in 2022 and now serves as a Managing Editor for the npj Series. She is based in the London office.
Associate Editors
Malak Abedalthagafi, MD, PhD
Deputy Director, Assoc. Research Professor
King Abdulaziz City of Science and Technology
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Dr Abedalthagafi is an American board-certified physician-scientist in Clinical Pathology, Anatomical Pathology, Neuropathology, and Molecular Genetics Pathology. She is also the Chair of the Genomics Research Department at King Fahad Medical City. Her research has contributed to advances in molecularly targeted approaches for meningioma and pediatric glioblastoma. Her lab focuses on the intersection between pediatric cancer, familial cancer predisposition syndromes, cancer genomics and therapeutic intervention.
Christopher Alvarez-Breckenridge, MD, PhD
Assistant Professor, Department of Neurosurgery
University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
TX, USA
Christopher A. Alvarez-Breckenridge, M.D., Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Neurosurgery at MD Anderson Cancer Center. He was a member of the Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP) at The Ohio State University where he received his combined MD/PhD and his doctoral research focused on oncolytic viral therapy for gliomas. He subsequently completed residency in neurosurgery at Massachusetts General Hospital. During that time his research focused on markers of response to immune checkpoint blockade for central nervous system metastases. He subsequently completed a Neurosurgical Oncology Fellowship at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center prior to joining the faculty as a member of the MD Anderson Physician Scientist Program. In addition to a clinical practice focusing on cranial and spinal malignancies, he leads a translational research laboratory focusing on immunotherapeutic approaches for brain and spinal metastases along with primary spinal tumors.
Pedro Ballester, PhD
Royal Society Wolfson Fellow & Associate Professor
Imperial College London
London, UK
Dr. Ballester is a Royal Society Wolfson Fellow & Associate Professor at Imperial College London, where he heads a group in Artificial Intelligence for Healthcare. Prior to this, he was Assistant Professor at INSERM in France after several postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge and the European Bioinformatics Institute in the UK. His research interests include the development and application of computational approaches for predicting patient response to drug treatments exploiting heterogeneous multi-omics and clinical data sources.
Pradeep Chaluvally Raghavan, PhD
Assoc. Prof. Obstetrics and Gynecology
Medical College of Wisconsin
Milwaukee, USA
Dr. Chaluvally Raghavan is a faculty in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology with an adjunct appointment in the Department of Physiology at the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW), Milwaukee. His lab is actively researching how RNA Binding Proteins (RBP) contribute to phase separation in cancer cells, stromal cells, and immune cells. The overarching goal of his lab is to characterize the cooperative oncogenesis orchestrated through RBPs for cancer progression. They are developing and validating agents that abolish cooperative oncogenesis by inhibiting the actions of RBPs and their targets. His team is also testing how single-cell genomic technologies can serve as devices for efficient target identification and drug development for cancer therapy.
Matthew Gubin, PhD
Asst. Professor of Immunology
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
Houston, Texas, USA
The main emphasis of Dr. Gubin's research is to define the antigenic targets of tumor-specific T cells and better understand how T cells recognize and either eliminate cancer or fail to control tumor growth in response to cancer immunotherapy. By combining preclinical genetically engineered mouse models with analysis of human patient samples by high dimensional approaches including single-cell RNA sequencing and mass cytometry by CyTOF, his lab is focused on developing effective combinatorial immunotherapies targeting tumor-specific mutant neoantigens in both primary and metastatic cancer.
Ryohei Katayama, PhD
Chief, Division of Experimental Chemotherapy
Japanese Foundation for Cancer Research
Tokyo, Japan
Dr. Katayama's main research focus is to decipher the mechanism of drug resistance in lung cancer, especially fusion oncogenes driven lung cancer such as ALK or ROS1. He has ample experience in translational research conducted using clinical specimens collaborating with clinicians and scientists in the institute that he belongs to, Japanese Foundation for Cancer Research, in Tokyo. As he graduated PhD in pharmaceutical science from pharmaceutical department, he aims to identify therapeutic strategies to overcome drug resistance. Recently, he has also conducted research evaluating the resistance mechanisms to immune checkpoint inhibitors in multiple cancer types. His lab also focuses on understanding the mechanisms of cancer metastasis, and identification of molecular targets in rare cancers such as osteosarcoma or colorectal cancer in younger generation.
Jakob Nikolas Kather, PhD
Professor, Technical University of Dresden
Dresden, Germany
I am a physician with board certification in internal medicine and multiple years of clinical experience in oncology, in particular of gastrointestinal cancer. In parallel, I obtained a technical degree and established a research group of computational oncology. The focus of my interdisciplinary team is the development and validation of artificial intelligence and mechanistic modeling methods in oncology. Specific interests include image analysis of histopathology and radiology data, analysis of tabular data and multimodal data integration.
Julie J. Miller, MD, PhD
Assistant Professor, Pappas Center for Neuro-Oncology, Department of Neurology
Massachusetts General Hospital
MA, USA
Dr. Julie Miller is an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School and a Neuro-Oncologist within the Pappas Center for Neuro-Oncology in the Department of Neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital. Her research focuses on IDH-mutant gliomas, a class of brain tumors that are driven by mutations that regulate metabolism. She utilizes a combination of genetic, pharmacologic and metabolomic approaches in patient-derived glioma models to elucidate the metabolic and cellular pathways that are disrupted by mutant IDH, with the goal of developing novel treatment strategies.
Martin Sos, MD
Professor; Molecular Pathology, Inst. for Pathology & Dept. for Translational Genomics
University Hospital Cologne
Germany
Dr. Sos is a Professor at the University Hospital Cologne in Germany where he heads the group of Molecular Pathology. His career encompasses medical training, cancer genomics research and translational oncology. His research interests include the dissection molecular processes that drive tumorigenesis and the study of inflammatory programs in the tumor microenvironment. His lab is focused on the therapeutic exploitation of these molecular processes and the translation of these principles into clinical practice.
Aria Vaishnavi, PhD
Assistant Professor, Department of Cancer Biology
UT MD Anderson Cancer Center
Texas, USA
The Vaishnavi lab studies mechanisms of tumor initiation, maintenance, progression, and therapeutic response. To do this, we utilize genetically engineered mouse models, patient-derived xenograft mouse models, and cultured cancer cells in combination with various genetic and pharmacological manipulations. We focus on understanding both the common and distinct signaling mechanisms used by oncogenes and cross-talk with support signaling pathways to understand their contributions to cancer.
Kris C. Wood, PhD
Assoc. Prof. Pharmacology and Cancer Biology
Duke University
NC, USA
Dr. Wood is a cancer biologist who leads a research program that leverages tools from pharmacology, genomics, and cell signaling to define principles that underlie the design of effective precision anticancer therapeutics. Major research interests include the use of functional genomics approaches to define therapeutic strategies to circumvent resistance and elucidate mechanisms of cell death regulation in cancer. Collectively, these studies are leading to both fundamental new insights into the core survival circuitry operating in defined human tumor subsets as well as novel translational therapeutics.
Founding Editor
Ann M. Bode, PhD
Interim Executive Director
The Hormel Institute, University of Minnesota
MN, USA
Dr. Ann M. Bode is the co-leader of Molecular and Cellular Biology research sections at The Hormel Institute, University of Minnesota. Previously, Dr. Bode ran a research program specializing in biomarker discovery and research focusing on the role of reactive oxygen species and antioxidants in chronic diseases, including cancer and diabetes. Her current research is focused on molecular and cellular mechanisms of cancer development and the identification of biomarkers that could determine whether a certain drug will be effective for preventing or treating cancer. She is a member of the Masonic Cancer Center, American Society of Clinical Oncology, American Association for the Advancement of Science and American Association for Cancer Research.
Advisory Editor
Kathryn McGinnis, PhD
Kathryn is an Associate Editor at Nature Communications, within the cancer team handling manuscripts regarding cancer omics and therapeutic biomarkers. She previously studied the role of steroids in brain cancer using bulk and single cell RNA-sequencing during her PhD and subsequent post-doc at the University of Leeds. She previously received her BSc in Immunology at the University of Glasgow, and MSc working in industry within stem cell banking.
Editorial Board Members
Carlos L. Arteaga, MD, Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA
Aditya Bardia, MD, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Adam J Bass, MD, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA
Ilana Chefetz Menaker, PhD, The Hormel Institute, University of Minnesota, Austin, Minnesota, USA
Eric Collisson, MD, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA
Dan Dixon, PhD, University of Kansas Cancer Center, Kansas City, Kansas, USA
Angela J George, MB ChB MDRes FRACP, The Institute of Cancer Research, London, UK
Ernie Hawk, MD, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, Texas, USA
John V Heymach, MD, PhD, Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, Texas, USA
Luke H. Hoeppner, PhD, The Hormel Institute, University of Minnesota, Austin, Minnesota, USA
Albert E Kim, MD, Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, Massachusetts, USA
Scott M. Lippman, MD, UC San Diego School of Medicine, La Jolla, California, USA
Sherene Loi, MD, PhD, Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre & University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia
Mark M. Moasser, MD, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA
Rebecca J. Morris, PhD, The Hormel Institute, University of Minnesota, Austin, Minnesota, USA
Sathiya Pandi Narayanan, PhD, SIDRA Medicine, Qatar
Rachael C Natrajan, PhD, The Institute of Cancer Research, London, UK
Emanuel F. Petricoin, PhD, George Mason University, Manassas, Virginia USA
Sanjay K. Srivastava, PhD, Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, Amarillo, Texas, USA
Young-Joon Surh, PhD, Molecular Medicine and Biopharmaceutical Sciences, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea
Eva Szabo, MD, National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland, USA
Hongyang Wang, MD, PhD, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China
Douglas Yee, MD, Masonic Cancer Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
Alexandra S Zimmer, MD, OHSU, Knight Cancer Institute, OR, USA
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