Ashish Shah, MD
Ashish Shah, MD, has assumed the newly created position of Director of Clinical Trials and Translational Research and principal investigator in the Section of Virology and Immunotherapy at Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center’s Brain Tumor Initiative (BTI) at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. Dr. Shah returns to the site of his undergraduate studies, medical school, and residency as a faculty member. This follows a year-long fellowship at the National Institutes of Health, where he focused on clinical trial design and translational neuro-oncology.
Now, Dr. Shah’s mission is to marry the clinical trials experience with his laboratory research and neurosurgery background to help the team bring novel therapeutics to patients with brain tumors. Most of Dr. Shah’s work will focus on the highly aggressive glioblastoma, which represents about half of all malignant brain tumors. Although nearly all glioblastomas recur after surgery, the BTI’s innovative approaches have resulted in some of the best patient outcomes in the country.
Viral-Based Gene Therapy
Much of Dr. Shah’s research focus, however, will focus on viruses associated with brain tumors, which he sees as fundamental to understanding glioblastoma in particular and which may underlie curative treatment that has been so elusive in this complex cancer.
Viral-based gene therapy uses viruses to deliver genes into cancer cells and, by changing their fundamental genome, make them more susceptible to cancer treatments. Working with colleagues, Dr. Shah recently discovered a key role of endogenous retroviruses in glioblastoma development, and he is also working to develop virotherapy that involves delivering tumor-selective “suicide genes,” using a novel retrovirus.
This viral-based gene therapy approach reprograms cancer cells to be sensitive to harmless “prodrugs,” eliciting a robust antitumor immune response. In clinical trials, it has been shown to extend overall survival by several months for certain high-grade gliomas.
The team is planning future biomarker-driven virotherapy trials, as well as trials that will help predict which patients may benefit from certain therapies. “Potentiating the immune response against our brain tumors is critical,” Dr. Shah said. “If we can use retroviruses to both kill tumors and induce an immune response, that is where I think the future is.”
