Professor and Director, Sarcoma Center
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Ludwig Center at Harvard Medical School
Dr. Demetri received his A.B. from Harvard and M.D. from Stanford before residency at the University of Washington, Seattle and medical oncology fellowship at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School. He is the Director of the Sarcoma Center and Senior Vice-President for Experimental Therapeutics at Dana-Farber; he also co-directs the Ludwig Center at Harvard along with Joan Brugge, PhD. His career as a physician-scientist has focused on developing therapies targeting specific oncogenic mechanisms to treat precisely-defined subsets of sarcomas and other cancers. He was instrumental in the development of imatinib as the first effective therapy for gastrointestinal stromal tumor (GIST) as a paradigm of a mutation-driven solid tumor. His collaborative research efforts have contributed to U.S. FDA approval of 8 different therapies to treat GIST or other sarcomas. On the basis of this body of work, Dr. Demetri was awarded the 2020 David A. Karnofsky Memorial Award from the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO).
Dr. Demetri recently co-founded a private biotechnology company, IDRX, along with Nick Lydon, PhD and Alexis Borisy; he also currently serves on the Board of Directors of Blueprint Medicines, a public biotechnology company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as well as serving in scientific advisory roles for several other biotech and pharma companies worldwide.