I am a Professor in the Department of Radiation and Cellular Oncology at the University of Chicago, where I am a physician-scientist and have been an investigator in the Ludwig Center since 2016. My laboratory studies why a subset of patients whose cancer has spread can be cured when most cannot, and how to identify them before treatment begins.

The oligometastatic hypothesis, advanced at the University of Chicago by Samuel Hellman and Ralph Weichselbaum, holds that metastatic cancer spans a spectrum from limited, curable disease to widespread malignancy. My laboratory established the first molecular basis for curable metastatic disease. Profiling colorectal cancer that had spread to the liver, we identified three subtypes of metastasis (canonical, immune and stromal) and found that patients with immune subtype tumors had a 94% ten-year survival after surgery. We built a genomic classifier to identify them, validated it in the randomized phase 3 New EPOC trial, and now offer it as a clinical test, PersonaCRC, through PersonaDx, a company I co-founded.

A second line of work concerns how radiotherapy and immunotherapy interact in patients. Through investigator-initiated trials I have co-led for more than a decade, we found that tumors with severe chromosomal disorder, a state called aneuploidy, respond poorly to immune checkpoint blockade but respond considerably better when ablative radiotherapy is delivered concurrently. We also showed that radiation induces amphiregulin, which recruits immunosuppressive myeloid cells and primes distant organs to receive circulating tumor cells; blocking it prevents radiation-induced metastasis without weakening local tumor control.

Current work concerns aberrant RNA processing that disables antigen presentation and shields tumors from T cells, the influence of the gut microbiome on response to combined radiation and immunotherapy, and the systemic signals induced by treatment that drive wasting and immune suppression in advanced disease.

I have published more than 110 peer-reviewed articles. I am a Fletcher Scholar of the Cancer Research Foundation and have received a Career Development Award from the LUNGevity Foundation, a Lung Cancer Discovery Award from the American Lung Association, a Transformational Award from the Falk Medical Research Trust, and the John D. Arnold, MD, Mentor Award from the Pritzker School of Medicine. My research is also supported by the NIH.