Jeffrey S. Ross, M.D. is a graduate of Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio and The State University of New York at Buffalo School of Medicine in Buffalo, New York. He trained in Pathology at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts.
From 1977 until 1989 he was Professor and Assistant Dean University of Massachusetts Medical School and research Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital.
Dr. Ross was the Cyrus Strong Merrill Professor and Chairman of the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the Albany Medical College in Albany, New York from 1989 to 2017. In 2017, Dr. became the Jones-Rohner Endowed Professor of Pathology, Oncology and Urology at the Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, NY.
In 2009, Dr. Ross became the Founding Strategic Advisor and the Medical Director for Foundation Medicine, Inc. in Cambridge, MA. Dr. Ross has received numerous academic awards, four patents in molecular diagnostics and is the author of more than 900 peer-reviewed scientific articles and abstracts, 4 textbooks and numerous book chapters in the fields of pathology, molecular diagnostics, oncology and translational cancer research.
Abstract:
Hybrid capture-based comprehensive genomic profiling has been widely applied to novel anti-cancer drug development and has the potential to maximize patient treatment options for both targeted and immunotherapies.
A wide variety of solid tumours and hematologic malignancies are currently being assessed by DNA only and DNA plus RNA sequencing to search for therapy targets that can be matched to both drugs on the market and enable enrolment in mechanism driven clinical trials. In addition, the liquid biopsy has emerged and shows great promise to guide therapy for some cancer patients especially when tissue samples are not available and there is a need to discover therapy resistance pathways.
For immunotherapy, the ability of the hybrid capture system to determine both microsatellite instability status and the tumour mutational burden has been combined with PD-L1 immunostaining to personalize the use of immune checkpoint inhibitor therapies. More recently this system has also identified individual genomic alterations associated with both immunotherapy drug efficacy and resistance.
In this manner, the marrying of clinical and genomic data will continue to drive a new wave of anti-cancer therapies and improve outcomes for cancer patients throughout the world.
