Description:

Please join us for the annual Michael Jaharis lecture with speaker Luis Diaz, MD, from the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Weill Cornell Medical College.

Talk title: "Clinical applications of cancer genomics"

Bio:

Dr. Diaz is the Head of the Division of Solid Tumor Oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and the Grayer Family Endowed Chair. Prior to this appointment, he was a faculty member and physician at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.  

He is recognized for his pioneering efforts to provide the first definitive examples of using circulating tumor DNA as cancer biomarker for screening, monitoring, and detection of occult disease and for the discovery of the therapeutic link between immunotherapy and cancer genetics in patients with mismatch repair deficient tumors.  His work led to the landmark proof-of-concept study using PD-1 blockade in patients with mismatch repair deficient tumors, which led to the historic first pan-tumor FDA approval for any solid tumors with this genetic lesion.  

He currently sits on the board of director of Quest Diagnostics. He was previously a board member of Jounce Therapeutics and Personal Genome Diagnostics. 

He is a founder serval biotechnology companies including Pagerbox, Pagene/Thrive Diagnostics, Personal Genome Diagnostics, Inostics and Epitope. 

He is a member of the AACR Fellows Academy and was awarded the Waun Ki Hong Award for Outstanding Achievement in Cancer Research in 2020. He is also the leader of the SU2C Colon Cancer Dream Team, Editor-in-Chief of Cancer Discovery and is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine (NAM), American Society of Clinical Investigation (ASCI) and American Academy of Physicians (AAP).  Dr. Diaz was appointed by President Joseph Biden to the National Cancer Advisory Board to the White House and is on the Board of Directors of Quest Diagnostics.