Adam J Bass
Photo: Adam J. Bass

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Elected 2017

Dr. Bass is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and an Associate Member of the Broad Institute. Following education at Amherst College and Duke University school of Medicine, he pursued clinical training in Internal Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and in Medical Oncology at the Dana-Farber/Partners Cancer Care fellowship and received a Master's Degree in Clinical Investigation from Harvard Medical School. During his clinical training, he started post-doctoral training in cancer genomics and cancer biology under the mentorship of Dr. Matthew Meyerson at Dana-Farber and the Broad Institutes. During his research training, he developed an interest in gastrointestinal cancers, most specifically in stomach and esophageal cancers. He then started his independent research laboratory at Dana-Farber in 2010. His lab has led several major initiatives to genomically characterize stomach and esophageal cancers. Most notably, Dr. Bass co-led large collaborative efforts in these cancers through The Cancer Genome Atlas initiative out of the National Institutes of Health. These studies led to new classification structures for these diseases and are guiding new clinical development of future therapies. Beyond studies of the cancer genome, the Bass Laboratory is increasing its focus on the functional and translational biology in these diseases. Emerging efforts are pursuing fundamental mechanisms of action of distinct oncogenic alterations and are evaluating therapeutic approaches to target cancers with specific genomic features. Additionally, increasing focus is being placed upon direct analysis of patient samples from clinical trials and collaboratively developing new clinical trials to bring biomarker drive, rational therapeutics into therapy of these cancers.