Solit Headlines Feb. DCI Seminar Series (2.23.22)

The February 2022 Duke Cancer Institute Seminar Series, to be held on Wednesday, Feb. 23, via Zoom, will feature Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center's David Solit, MD — director of the Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis Center for Molecular Oncology, Geoffrey Beene Chair for Cancer Research, and a practicing GU medical oncologist specializing in prostate and bladder cancer. He will present “Defining the Actionable Genome.”

One long-standing problem in oncology is the variability among patients as regards their response to standard and investigational cancer treatments. Solit and his research group pioneered the use of whole genome sequencing methods to identify occult predictors of drug response; work that serves as the basis for the NCI Extraordinary Responder Initiative.

As director of the Center for Molecular Oncology, Solit leads a multidisciplinary team of clinicians, geneticists, bioinformaticians and lab scientists whose mission is to develop therapies that are individualized to each patient’s cancer. The Center has led efforts to molecularly profile all patients with recurrent or metastatic cancer who are being treated at MSK. Using the MSK-IMPACT targeted assay, MSK has prospectively sequenced over 70,000 patient tumors over the past five years.

Solit, who also serves as a professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College and as a professor of Cell and Developmental Biology at Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences, has had a long-standing interest in the development of selective inhibitors of the MAP kinase pathway and his lab was a leader in defining mechanisms of resistance to RAF and MEK inhibitors. (Kinase inhibitors are a class of targeted therapies — drugs that block the pathways inside cancer cells that cause the cells to grow and spread.)

Solit was inducted into the American Society for Clinical Investigation in 2011. He has served on the Dana Farber Cancer Institute/Harvard Cancer Center External Advisory Board since 2014 and has served on the Molecular Tumor Board (MTB) for the American Society of Clinical Oncology
Targeted Agent and Profiling Utilization Registry (TAPUR) Study, since 2016. He is senior editor of the journal Cancer Research (since 2012) and serves on the Scientific Editorial Board of Cancer Discovery, the Editorial Board of Clinical Cancer Research, the Editorial Board of Molecular Cancer Therapeutics, and the Editorial Board of JCO Precision Oncology.

Solit has given nearly 200 invited lectures over the past 20 years, authored 275 articles in professional peer-reviewed journals, and authored more than 50 books, book chapters and reviews.

A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine (1995), Solit completed his residency in Internal Medicine at Barnes-Jewish Hospital/Washington University in St. Louis. In 1998, he joined MSK as a medical oncology fellow and Weill Cornell Medical College as a medicine fellow before going on to join the faculty at both institutions.

Solit's lecture begins at 8 a.m. and ends at 9 a.m. The February 2022 DCI Seminar Series is presented by the DCI Precision Cancer Medicine & Investigational Therapeutics Research Program and is held in conjunction with Hematology Oncology Grand Rounds.

For more information and to access the Zoom link for this talk, email Joan Lofton, MBA, AGM