Phase I Oncology Drug Development (PDF)

damage response (DDR) with novel therapeutics, such as ATR and PARP inhibitors, as well as the development of novel immunotherapuetics.



Dr Jordi Rodon MD PhD: Dr Jordi Rodón specializes in early drug development, biomarker discovery, personalized cancer medicine, and neuro-oncology. He is now at MD Anderson's Investigational Cancer Therapeutics department after moving from Barcelona, where he has been the director and clinical head of the Research Unit for Molecular Therapy of Cancer at the Vall d'Hebron University Hospital in Barcelona, Spain. Within this unit, he served as clinical head of the Early Clinical Drug Development Group, which aims to develop best-in-class targeted therapies, determine patient populations most likely to benefit using personalized molecular characterization, and identify biomarkers of response. At Vall d'Hebron University Hospital he was also in charge of the Neuroncology program, building it in collaboration with the Phase I Unit, the multidisciplinary clinic and the Gene Expression and Cancer Laboratory leaded by Joan Seoane.



Dr Rodón earned his medical and doctoral degrees at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and completed a doctorate the Universitat de Barcelona. He spent two years at the Advanced Drug Development program at the Institute for Drug Development (IDD) in San Antonio, Texas and completed his training in drug development at MD Anderson Cancer Center as a senior clinical research fellow. During this time at MDACC, Dr Rodón also completed an internship at the Kleberg Center for Molecular Markers under the direction of Dr. Gordon Mills.



Over the course of his career, Dr Rodón has been the principal or co-principal investigator on over 30 early phase clinical trials focusing on a range of advanced solid malignancies, partnering with leaders in industry including Novartis, Merck, Eli Lilly, Genentech, Sanofi, and others. With this, hehas contributed to about 60 peer-reviewed publications detailing both trial results and basic research findings. Dr. Rodón's most significant contributions to the field include the development of PI3K, FGFR and TGFbeta inhibitors, pilot studies in Precision/Personalized Cancer Medicine and multiple translational collaborations in those fields.



David S Hong, M.D. is Deputy Chair at the department of Investigational Cancer Therapeutics at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. His research interests include Phase I studies Drug development and the molecular basis of cancer. He studied medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and specialised in oncology at Yale University.