Head Department of General Medical Oncology
Laboratory of Experimental Oncology, Department of Oncology, KU Leuven, Leuven Cancer Institute, Belgium
Patrick Schöffski is a medical doctor specializing in internal medicine, hematology and medical oncology. He holds a master's degree in public health from Hannover Medical School.
He is the head of the Department of General Medical Oncology at the University Hospitals Leuven and leads the Laboratory of Experimental Oncology at KU Leuven, Belgium. He was Secretary-General of EORTC, part of the Board of Directors of ECCO and the Connective Tissue Oncology Society (CTOS).
Schöffski’s main clinical interest is the treatment of solid tumors. He is involved in a large number of prospective clinical trials (Phase I-III) in various tumor types, including orphan malignancies. He leads an active phase I-team, has a strong interest in multitumor phase II-screening studies, runs complex clinical trials in the field of personalized oncology and registration studies in various malignancies. He coordinates translational research projects associated with new drug development in sarcoma.
His Laboratory of Experimental Oncology at KU Leuven has a focus on mesenchymal malignancies and developed more than 60 patient-derived xenograft models of soft tissue sarcomas and gastrointestinal stromal tumors since 2004, which are used for early drug screening and cancer biology studies. He was work package leader in EU’s Connective Tissue Cancers Network (CONTICANET). He is member of EURACAN. In 2019 Prof. Schöffski founded FORTRESS, the Forum for Translational Research in Sarcomas, an annual meeting for scientists involved in laboratory research in the field of sarcoma.
Prof. Schöffski has published 325 papers in peer-reviewed journals and promoted numerous thesis projects. He is member of the advisory board of several pharmaceutical companies and academic organizations. Until 2014 he was scientific chair of the Methods in Clinical Cancer Research Workshop. Based on his research expertise, Prof. Schöffski is member of a number of Independent Data Monitoring Committees for ongoing and completed Phase II/III clinical trials.