Dean Felsher Receives NCI 2020 Outstanding Investigator Award

Dean Felsher, MD,PhD, professor of medicine (oncology) and pathology, is the recipient of a National Cancer Institute (NCI) 2020 Outstanding Investigator Award. This recognition, according to NCI’s website, “supports accomplished leaders in cancer research, who are providing significant contributions toward understanding cancer and developing applications that may lead to a breakthrough in biomedical, behavioral, or clinical cancer research.” The funding, which can cover up to seven years of direct costs, encourages scientists to take risks and be adventurous with their work.

As head of The Dean Felsher Lab at Stanford Medicine, Felsher and colleagues have developed model systems capable of conditionally activating oncogenes in normal human and mouse cells in tissue culture or in specific tissues of transgenic mice. An NCI summary of Felsher’s project says the grant will support his lab in further understanding oncogenes, specially targeting the MYC pathway, the most commonly activated oncogene in human cancer, to treat the disease. NCI notes that, to date, there are no existing therapies able to successfully directly target MYC or the MYC pathway.

Felsher is also the director of Stanford Medicine’s Translational Research and Applied Medicine Program and Advanced Residency Training, a member of Bio-X, Maternal & Child Health Research Institute and Stanford Cancer Institute and a faculty fellow with the ChEM-H Molecular Imaging Program.