Valsamo Anagnostou

Biography
Dr. Anagnostou is a translational cancer investigator focused on large-scale genomic and liquid-biopsy analyses of human cancers. Her group has discovered novel genomic mechanisms underlying response and resistance to immunotherapy, and focuses on understanding how cancer cells acquire fitness advantages that enable them to evade immune elimination during immunotherapy. Her research aims to capturing residual disease and therapy resistance using minimally invasive assays and novel methods for circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) detection, and on translating these approaches into innovative, molecularly guided treatment strategies for individuals with cancer. She is leading the design of ctDNA residual disease-adaptive immunotherapy clinical trials for patients with both early-stage and metastatic non-small cell lung cancer and holds leadership positions in national clinical trial cooperative groups. Her long-term goal is to transform medical oncology into personalized molecular oncology, in which treatment decisions are tailored to the evolving cancer genome and to real-time molecular response assessments informed by liquid biopsies.