Victor E. Velculescu, MD, PhD

Professor Victor Velculescu is internationally known for his discoveries in genomics and cancer research.  He and his colleagues performed the first genome-wide sequence analysis in human cancers, identifying key genes and pathways dysregulated in tumorigenesis.  He developed methods for global gene expression analyses and coined the word “transcriptome" to describe the patterns that could now obtained in cancer and other cells.  This research has revealed the genomic landscape of human cancers, including in breast, colorectal, brain, pancreatic, ovarian, head and neck, and lung cancers.  These analyses identified a variety of genes not previously known to be involved in neoplasia, including PIK3CA as one of the most highly mutated genes in human cancer.  More recently, his group has developed non-invasive liquid biopsies approaches for early detection and monitoring of cancer patients.  These discoveries provide new paradigms for our understanding of human cancer, and have created opportunities for precision diagnostics and personalized medicine for oncology and other diseases.

Dr. Velculescu is Professor of Oncology and Pathology and Co-Director of Cancer Biology at the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He has a B.S. from Stanford University, and M.D., Ph.D. degrees from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Dr. Velculescu has served as a member of the Board of Directors of the American Association of Cancer Research (AACR), as a member of scientific advisory boards of Ludwig Cancer Research, Cancer Research UK, Harvard Cancer Center, Tisch Cancer Center at Mount Sinai, Mark Foundation, and the White House Cancer Moonshot, and is a founder of Personal Genome Diagnostics.  He is the recipient of several awards for his work including the Grand Prize Winner of the Amersham/Pharmacia & Science Young Scientist Prize (1999), Judson Daland Prize of the American Philosophical Society (2008), the European Association of Cancer Research and Carcinogenesis Young Investigator Award (2008), the AACR Award for Outstanding Achievement in Cancer Research (2009), the Paul Marks Prize for Cancer Research (2011), the EY Entrepreneur of the Year Award for Maryland (2016), and with his colleagues, the AACR Team Science Award for Research in Pancreatic Cancer (2013), Brain Cancer (2014), and Liquid Biopsies (2017).