Posts by Gad Getz, PhD
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Distinct Cellular Dynamics Are Associated With Response to CAR-T Therapy for B-Cell Lymphoma
Marcela V. Maus, MD, PhD, Gad Getz, PhD and colleagues observed that even small increases in CAR regulatory T cells contributed to relapse after axicabtagene ciloleucel treatment of refractory large B-cell lymphoma. This and other findings may optimize the design and individualization of CAR T-cell therapies.
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Comprehensive Study of Noncoding DNA Reveals Unexpectedly Few Cancer Drivers
Esther Rheinbay, PhD and Gad Getz, PhD, of the Center for Cancer Research, and colleagues found that despite the use of novel, comprehensive strategies for discovery, point mutations that drive cancer were infrequent in noncoding genomic elements.
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Genetic Drivers in Hürthle Cell Carcinoma
A Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center team has identified important genetic drivers in Hürthle cell carcinoma (HCC): widespread chromosomal losses in the cells and mutations in nuclear and mitochondrial DNA.
Biography
Gad Getz is an internationally acclaimed leader in cancer genomics and is pioneering widely used tools for analyzing cancer genomes. Getz is an institute member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where he directs the Cancer Genome Computational Analysis Group. Getz is a professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School, and he is a faculty member and director of bioinformatics at the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center and Department of Pathology. He is also the inaugural incumbent of the Paul C. Zamecnik Chair in Oncology at the Mass General Cancer Center.
The Getz Laboratory specializes in cancer genome analysis, which includes two major steps. The first is characterization — cataloging of all genomic events and the mechanisms that created them during the clonal evolution of cancer (starting from normal cells and progressing to premalignancy, primary cancer, and emergence of resistance), and comparing events at the DNA, RNA, and protein levels between tumor and normal samples from an individual patient. The second is interpretation — analysis of the characterization data across a cohort of patients with the aim of identifying the alterations in genes and pathways that drive cancer progression or increase its risk, as well as identifying molecular subtypes of the disease, their markers, and relationship to clinical variables.
In addition to his roles at the MGH and the Broad Institute, Getz is the principal investigator of the Processing Genome Data Analysis Center (GDAC), as part of the NCI Genome Data Analysis Network; a co-leader of the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) project; and a co-principal investigator of the Broad’s Proteogenomics Data Analysis Center. Getz was a member of the NCI’s Cancer Moonshot Blue Ribbon Panel and co-led one of three NCI Cloud Pilots. He has published numerous papers in prominent journals describing new methodologies to study cancer genomes that have identified new genes and pathways involved in different tumor types, mutational signatures, and tumor evolution.
Getz received his BS degree in physics and mathematics from Hebrew University and a MSc in physics from Tel-Aviv University. He later earned a PhD in physics from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. He completed his postdoctoral training at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard with Todd Golub, where he focused on developing computational tools and analyzing expression of miRNAs across cancer.
Mass General Cancer Center
An integral part of one of the world’s most distinguished academic medical centers, the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center is among the leading cancer care providers in the United States.
