Joseph Minhow Chan, MD, PhD

As a clinician, I work in the inpatient setting, where I treat patients who have been admitted to Memorial Hospital. In the hospital, I work closely with a dedicated group of doctors, including world-renowned lung cancer experts, nurses and nurse practitioners, pharmacists, and support staff to deliver the highest-quality care possible. In addition to medical management, I strive to communicate with my patients and their families to ease the burden of uncertainty. Whether you are a patient or a family member, any experience with cancer can be scary. So much of the fear associated with cancer is fear of the unknown, and I will take the time to discuss the rationale and expectations for any diagnostic tests or treatments so that we can banish this fear as much as possible.

As a physician-scientist and computational biologist conducting cancer research at Sloan Kettering Institute (SKI), I aim to gain a better understanding of lineage plasticity, a poorly understood mechanism of therapeutic resistance and metastasis in cancer. A key example of plasticity in cancer is when adenocarcinoma escapes pressure from targeted therapies by transforming into a more aggressive disease called small cell cancer. This phenomenon arises in many different cancer types, including lung, prostate, bladder, uterine, cervical, gastrointestinal tract, and head and neck, among others. I also strive to use single-cell technologies to understand how lineage plasticity in lung and prostate cancer affects tumor progression, and how the surrounding microenvironment can impact this process. The overarching goal of this research is to identify a new class of drugs that can reverse plasticity, thereby restoring the disease’s original sensitivity to targeted therapies.

I completed my undergraduate studies in biomedical computation at Stanford University, my MD/PhD at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, my residency in internal medicine at Weill Cornell Medical Center at NewYork-Presbyterian, and, finally, my fellowship in oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. For my PhD work, I studied computational biology and developed new methods to model the topology of viral evolution and identify gene fusions in cancer. These methods supported the identification of a class of recurrent FGFR-TACC fusions in brain cancer; of note, this was the first time that this mutation was found in any cancer. Now, this mutation is an FDA-approved drug target in bladder and gallbladder cancer.