Professor and Senior Vice President of Experimental Therapeutics
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Ludwig Center at Harvard Medical School
Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Dr. Demetri received his A.B. in biochemical sciences from Harvard College and M.D. from Stanford University, then pursued internal medicine residency and Chief Residency at the University of Washington, Seattle and medical oncology fellowship at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School. As a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, he co-directs the Ludwig Center at Harvard (with Joan Brugge, PhD) to support 30 investigative teams focused on understanding, overcoming, and preventing resistance to anticancer therapies. He also directs the DFCI-based David Liposarcoma Research Initiative as an international colllaboration. A former member of the Board of Directors of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), he is the immediate past Chair of the AACR Science Policy and Government Affairs Committee. His career as a physician-scientist has focused on developing therapies targeting specific oncogenic mechanisms to treat molecularly-defined subsets of sarcomas and other cancers. He led the development of imatinib as the first effective therapy for gastrointestinal stromal tumor (GIST) as a paradigm of a mutation-driven solid tumor. Subsequently, he led the development of the next two FDA-approved drugs for GIST (sunitinib and regorafenib) after resistance to imatinib appeared. His research efforts have subsequently contributed to U.S. FDA approval of multiple other therapies to treat GIST (e.g. avapritinib), other sarcomas (e.g. trabectedin, pazopanib and eribulin) as well as other malignancies (e.g. vemurafenib, the first BRAF inhibitor for V600E-mutant melanomas, as the oncologist on the Scientific Advisory Board of Plexxikon). In addition to scientific advisory roles for several biotech and pharma companies worldwide, Dr. Demetri recently co-founded a clinical stage biotech company (IDRx) to develop next-generation therapies for GIST. On the basis of this body of work, Dr. Demetri was awarded the 2020 David A. Karnofsky Memorial Award from the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO).
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