ASCI / Young Physician-Scientist Awards, 2022

Pavan Bachireddy, MD, obtained his MD from the Stanford University School of Medicine and completed his residency training in Internal Medicine at the Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston, MA. After his fellowship in Hematology/Oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, he completed his postdoctoral training in Catherine Wu’s laboratory, integrating multi-omic molecular measurements at bulk and single cell resolution to glean insights into the determinants of immunotherapeutic outcomes. In 2021, he joined the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center as an Assistant Professor, co-appointed in both the Departments of Hematopoietic Biology & Malignancy as well as Lymphoma & Myeloma, where he also serves as the Scientific Director of ECLIPSE. His group uses unbiased discovery tools to decode co-evolving leukemic-immune interactions that shape patient outcomes. Specifically, he has used bulk molecular signatures to demonstrate reversal of T cell exhaustion during response to adoptive cellular therapy (Blood, 2014), uncovered diverse patterns of leukemia-infiltrating immune cells corresponding to distinct clinical outcomes to ipilimumab (NEJM, 2016; Blood, 2021), and has identified a novel biomarker of outcome to CTLA-4 blockade in metastatic melanoma (Cell, 2018). More recently, he has utilized multi-omic discovery approaches to elucidate the biological determinants of graft-versus-leukemia (GvL) response and resistance, finding that distinct leukemic evolutionary trajectories underlie timing of leukemic relapse after allo-SCT (STM, 2020). Finally, he has pioneered longitudinal monitoring of intraleukemic T cell populations using innovative computational tools to identify the T cell states that define outcomes to adoptive cellular therapy (Cell Reports, 2021) and PD-1 blockade (Blood Advances, 2021).