August DCI Seminar Series

The August DCI Seminar Series, to be held on Wednesday, August 25, will feature Keith Ligon, MD, PhD, director of the Center for Patient Derived Models at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) and chief of Neuropathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

The title of his talk is "Therapeutic Resistance in Gliomas: Devils in the Details."

His talk is being co-presented as the Neurooncology Traynor Memorial Lecture.

An associate professor in the Department of Pathology at Harvard Medical School, Ligon's lab is focused on adult and pediatric gliomas and resistance to therapy. In addition to lab efforts around basic mechanisms of resistance, he has led translational efforts and clinical trial efforts at the national and international level. This includes serving on the Neuro-Oncology Committee and Children’s Oncology Group within the NCI Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology where he helps lead and train pathologists in the conduct of clinical trials science and correlatives. Ligon also co-leads the Broad-DFCI Models Center within the NCI Human Models Initiative — an international effort to make more than 1000 next generation cancer cell lines.

Ligon is currently funded with an NIH/NCI SPORE — Targeted Therapies for Glioma (2013-24) — the goal of which is to develop more effective targeted molecular therapies and biomarkers for glioblastoma. Ligon is co-investigator on "project two" of this grant — designing novel strategies for imaging and targeting IDH mutant gliomas — and co-director of the grant's Neuropathology Core.

Ligon earned his MD at the University of Texas Houston Medical School and his PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Texas-M.D. Anderson Cancer Center/University of Texas-Houston Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. His postdoctoral training included a residency in Anatomic Pathology at Brigham and Women's Hospital, a fellowship in Pathology at Harvard Medical School, a fellowship in Neuropathology at Brigham and Women's Hospital, and a research fellowship in Pediatric Oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Ligon has served on the faculty in the Department of Pathology at Harvard Medical School since 2002.

Ligon's lecture begins at 8 a.m. and ends at 9 a.m. The August DCI Seminar Series is presented by th DCI Neuro-Oncology Research Program and is held in conjunction with Hematology Oncology Grand Rounds.