Fred Lam, MD

Biography

Fred C. Lam, MD, PhD, FRCSC, is an Assistant Professor in Neurosurgery at the Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine, Boston, MA, USA. He is an attending neurosurgeon at St Elizabeth’s Medical Center in Brighton, MA, USA as well as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.

Dr. Lam is a neurosurgeon-scientist with an interest in improving the survival of patients with primary and secondary brain tumors. His postdoctoral research combines molecular and systems biology approaches to discovering novel therapeutic targets in cancer cells that can be applied in rational combinations. In collaboration with mentors in the Departments of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering at MIT, Dr. Lam developed nanocarriers that can cross the blood-brain barrier to deliver a variety of different types of pay load to brain tumors. As a neurosurgeon, Dr. Lam is interested in developing theranostic tools that can enhance intraoperative imaging of brain tumors and simultaneously deliver novel targeted therapies to tumor cells in order to improve surgical outcomes and enhance peri-operative adjuvant therapies. He is also interested in addressing the disparities in access to novel treatments for cancer patients in order to improve their survival outcomes.

Dr. Lam received his PhD in Neuroscience from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, where he discovered that the ABC transporter multi-drug resistance efflux pump, p-glycoprotein, is a bona fide transporter of A peptides, the key component in toxic amyloid plaques which are thought to be one of the main mechanisms causing neurodegeneration in the brains of Alzheimer’s Disease patients. His discovery was patented by the US and World Patent Offices, led to the founding of a biotechnology company called Active Pass Pharmaceuticals, and has inspired laboratories around the world to continue investigating the role of ABC transporters as therapeutic targets for the treatment of Alzheimer’s Disease.

Dr. Lam pursued a postdoctoral fellowship at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA, where he studied how cancer cells repair damaged DNA in response to ionizing radiation and different classes of small molecular inhibitors used in the treatment of brain tumors in the Yaffe Lab. In collaboration with the Hammond Lab in the Department of Chemical Engineering at MIT, Dr. Lam helped to develop nanocarriers that can cross the blood-brain barrier to deliver novel combination therapies in mouse models of glioblastoma, the most aggressive and deadliest primary brain in adults. In collaboration with the Belcher Lab in the Department of Bioengineering at MIT, he helped to develop a theranostic nanocarrier that can be used to detect and deliver multimodal therapies to treat gliomas in mouse models.

Prior to his position as an attending neurosurgeon at St Elizabeth’s Medical Center, Dr. Lam was a Clinical Scholar in the Division of Neurosurgery at Hamilton General Hospital, McMaster University Faculty of Health Sciences in Hamilton, Ontario, where he took care of brain tumor patients and conducted research in brain metastasis in the Singh Lab at the McMaster Cancer Research Center, Hamilton, Ontario. During his tenure as a Clinical Scholar in the Division of Neurosurgery, he helped the Singh Lab spearhead an organ donation program for patients with gliomas who wanted to donate their brain and spine for research purposes.

Dr. Lam is a member of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons, the Society for Neuro-Oncology, the American Association for Cancer Research, the Canadian Neurosurgical Society, the Radiosurgical Society, and the Subcortical Surgery Group.