OSUCCC – JAMES GRAND ROUNDS
The 2017-18 OSUCCC – James Grand Rounds series continues on selected Fridays throughout the academic year. All lectures take place from 8-9 a.m. in James L035 (Wasserstrom Family Conference Room on the Conference Level) unless otherwise noted, with breakfast available at 7:45 a.m. The next lecture will take place on Friday, April 6. Below is the biosketch for the next presenter.
APRIL 6 – Ezra Cohen, MD, professor of medicine at the University of California San Diego and associate director for translational science at Moores Comprehensive Cancer Center, will present “Precision Immunotherapy – Can We Stop Guessing?” at the April 6 Grand Rounds at 8 a.m. in L035 James.
Dr. Cohen, who also serves as co-director of the San Diego Center for Precision Immunotherapy and co-director of the Head and Neck Cancer Center of Excellence, is an internationally renowned translational researcher who has made major contributions to targeted therapy. His primary research focus for the past 18 years has been on head and neck cancer.
For nine years Dr. Cohen directed an independently funded laboratory team interested in mechanisms of novel therapeutics and developing molecularly targeted agents. His team made important discoveries relating to resistance to EGFR and P13 kinase pathway-directed drugs, findings that have supported the application of clinical trials on those agents. More recently his research has involved immunotherapy in head and neck cancer. He is study chair on several immunotherapy-directed clinical trials, including an international phase III study comparing pembrolizumab to standard of care in recurrent or metastatic head and neck squamous cell carcinoma.
Dr. Cohen has authored or co-authored more than 130 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals, along with 18 peer-reviewed commentaries and 11 book chapters. He serves on the editorial boards of the journals Clinical Cancer Research (for which he also is managing editor), Update on Cancer Therapeutics and US Oncology. He is an editorial adviser for Clinical Cancer Advances and an associate editor for Cancer.Net and Annals of Oncology. Dr. Cohen was editor in chief for Oral Oncology from 2011-16 and was previously on the editorial or advisory boards of several other journals, including Lancet Oncology and World Journal of Clinical Oncology.
Dr. Cohen earned his MD at the University of Toronto Medical School in Ontario, Canada. He served residencies in family medicine and in obstetrics at Toronto General Hospital, and a residency in internal medicine at Long Island Jewish Medical Center at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He also completed a fellowship in hematology/oncology at University of Chicago Hospitals.
