ASCI / Young Physician-Scientist Awards, 2024

Joseph M. Chan, MD, PhD is a physician scientist, thoracic oncologist, and computational biologist who is a new Assistant Professor at the Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program (HOPP) and Department of Medicine at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. He studied structural bioinformatics during undergrad at Stanford University under the mentorship of Dr. Russ Altman, and viral evolution and cancer genomics for his MD/PhD at Columbia University under mentorship of Dr. Raul Rabadan. There, he developed a topology-based method to model reticulate evolution in viruses that cannot be captured by phylogenetics. He also developed a method to detect gene fusions using next generation sequencing, which identified druggable oncogenic FGFR-TACC fusions in glioblastoma that were later found to be recurrent across multiple tumor types, including cholangiocarcinoma and bladder cancer where FGFR inhibition is now standard of care. This experience consolidated his interest in cancer research and propelled him to pursue internal medicine residency at Weill Cornell Medical Center and medical oncology fellowship at MSKCC, where he completed a postdoctorate under mentorship of Drs. Dana Pe’er and Charles Rudin. His research focused on understanding lineage plasticity across lung and prostate cancer with a special interest in histological transformation as a mechanism of acquired resistance. In a collaborative project with Dr. Charles Sawyers, he developed methods quantifying plasticity in prostate cancer and identified highly correlated gene programs that could represent drivers of this process. This strategy implicated FGFR & JAK/STAT inflammation, where combined FGFR and JAK inhibition reversed early tumor plasticity and restored sensitivity to androgen inhibition. He also created a single-cell atlas of SCLC patient tumors that identified canonical and non-canonical phenotypes in the context of the immune microenvironment. He now leads a multidisciplinary lab developing machine learning methods leveraging single-cell sequencing and spatial imaging to understand the epigenetic and environmental determinants of plasticity across tumor types and histological transitions.