David Tuveson, MD, PhD
David Tuveson, MD, PhD, will succeed Bruce Stillman, AO, FAA, FRS, as Director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Cancer Center.
Dr. Tuveson is the Roy J. Zuckerberg Professor of Cancer Research at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the Head of the Lustgarten Foundation Pancreatic Cancer Research Laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and also the Lustgarten Foundation’s Director of Research.
Dr. Tuveson’s research and clinical focus is pancreatic cancer. His research at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory is making progress toward finding a cure by detecting the disease earlier and designing novel therapeutic approaches, based in part on pancreatic organoid technology that he has pioneered.
“It’s a great honor to lead Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s Cancer Center and take on the challenge of creating better therapies and better diagnostics by leveraging the Laboratory’s unique strengths, which include expertise in developing new methods and technologies that will get us to our goal,” Dr. Tuveson said. “Through the use of technologies like 3D cell cultures—organoids—and gene-editing tools like CRISPR [clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats], I believe Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory will accelerate the drug discovery and development process. I’m very hopeful that 5 years from now, we should see next-generation therapeutic and diagnostic approaches, and we will hear more people saying: ‘I used to have cancer,’” Dr. Tuveson added.
Training and Experience
Dr. Tuveson obtained his medical and doctoral degrees at Johns Hopkins University. He was a medical resident at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a medical oncology fellow at Dana-Farber/Partners Cancer Care. During his postdoctoral years in Boston, Dr. Tuveson co-developed KIT inhibitors for gastrointestinal stromal tumors with George Demetri, MD, and created several KRAS-dependent mouse cancer models with Tyler Jacks, PhD. His laboratory also generated the first mouse models of ductal pancreatic cancer at the University of Pennsylvania.
Subsequently, he moved to the University of Cambridge, UK, to develop preclinical and clinical therapeutic strategies for pancreatic cancer. In 2012, Dr. Tuveson was recruited back to the United States to direct the Cancer Therapeutics Initiative within the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s Cancer Center. He continues to practice medical oncology with an adjunct appointment at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and a clinical affiliation at Northwell Health, formerly known as the North Shore-LIJ Health System.
Dr. Stillman has served as Director of the Laboratory’s National Cancer Institute–designated Cancer Center for 25 years, shepherding the Center through 5 highly successful renewals and overseeing significant expansion. He will continue in his long-standing role as President and Chief Executive Officer of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, as well as maintain a research laboratory that focuses on DNA replication and genome inheritance. ■
