ASCI / Young Physician-Scientist Awards, 2023
The Young Physician-Scientist Awards (YPSA) recognize physician-scientists who are early in their first faculty appointment and have made notable achievements in their research.
About the awardee
Felix Dietlein, MD, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School, an Associate Member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Core Faculty in the Computational Health Informatics Program at Boston Children’s Hospital, and an Investigator at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He completed medical school and doctoral degrees in mathematics and molecular medicine at the University of Cologne. He then pursued postdoctoral training in computational cancer genomics at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School.
Dr. Dietlein’s laboratory focuses on the data-driven discovery of molecular changes in tumor genomes that provide actionable drug targets for genome-inspired therapies in precision medicine - using a multidisciplinary approach. Dr. Dietlein uses his mathematical training to invent statistical and data science concepts that open new areas of investigation. As a geneticist, he leverages complex genomic mechanisms to identify therapeutic targets. As a computer scientist, he completes resource-intensive software engineering tasks on petabytes of data. As an experimental biologist, he masters several strategies to validate his mechanistic discoveries. As a physician-scientist, he understands the translational potential of his work and the value of close collaborations between basic scientists and clinicians.
Dr. Dietlein’s scientific contributions to precision medicine include the following: Genome-wide discovery of mutations in the noncoding cancer genome and their multifaceted roles in tumor formation (Science 2022). A comprehensive resource for classifying coding drivers in 11,873 patients based on nucleotide contexts (Nature Genetics 2020). A new platform for designing driver-directed combination therapies and synergistic interactions of small-molecule inhibitors (Cell 2015). Cancer therapies based on synthetic lethal interactions between non-homologous recombination and mismatch repair (Cancer Discovery 2014). Driver-directed drugs for smoking-associated lung cancer (PNAS 2012; Cancer Discovery 2014). A new class of fluorine-18-labeled tracers with improved sensitivity for PSMA PET/CT imaging of prostate cancer patients in radiology (JNM 2017; 2020; 2022).