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
Sylvan Baca, MD, PhD is a medical oncologist and translational investigator at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) and an Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School (HMS). Dr. Baca received his B.S. in Chemistry from Stanford University and his M.D. and Ph.D. in Biological and Biomedical Sciences from HMS. He completed residency training in internal medicine at the Brigham and Women's Hospital and a fellowship in medical oncology at the DFCI. Dr. Baca carried out his post-doctoral studies in cancer epigenetics with Dr. Matthew Freedman at the DFCI and the Broad Institute.
Dr. Baca has led foundational work in prostate cancer genomics and epigenomics that is published in Cell, Nature Genetics, and Nature Communications. His contributions include the identification of large-scale structural rearrangements – called chromoplexy – in prostate cancer genomes and the identification of FOXA1 and SPOP mutations in prostate cancer. In addition, his epigenome profiling studies identified FOXA1 as a master transcription factor in neuroendocrine prostate cancer (NEPC) and developed a blood-based biomarker for NEPC. He also developed a computational framework called Cistrome-Wide Association Study (CWAS) to uncover mechanisms underlying prostate cancer risk loci identified by genome-wide association studies.
In addition to caring for patients, Dr. Baca runs a multidisciplinary dry lab focused on translational cancer epigenomics. The overarching goal of his lab is to advance precision oncology by studying epigenetic changes that drive cancer. The Baca lab brings together clinicians, computer scientists and cancer biologists and aims to define gene regulatory programs that underlie cancer initiation, metastasis, and treatment resistance. The lab conducts both "bench to bedside" and "bedside to bench" studies - for instance, developing predictive epigenetic biomarkers for treatment response and analyzing tumor epigenomes from clinical specimens to identify cancer drivers.