Cancer Center Director Named
Thursday, November 5th, 2015 | Source: BUSM
Avrum Spira, MD, MSc, has been named Director of the Boston University Cancer Center, replacing Douglas Faller, MD, PhD, who stepped down last November to focus on oncology drug development.
Spira, a Professor of Medicine, Pathology and Bioinformatics, and the Alexander Graham Bell Professor in Health Care Entrepreneurship at BU, is founding Chief of the Division of Computational Biomedicine in the Department of Medicine and Function Leader for the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Program at BU’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute. He also is an attending physician in the Medical Intensive Care Unit at Boston Medical Center.
Since his 2003 appointment to the BU faculty, Spira has built a translational research program that focuses on genomic alterations associated with smoking-related lung disease, leading to a molecular test for the early detection of lung cancer that may transform the clinical care of high-risk smokers.
His research program is based on the paradigm that smoking and other inhaled carcinogens create a ‘field of molecular injury’ in epithelial cells that line the respiratory tract. Sampling these more assessable tissues allows the detection of lung cancer and other smoking-related lung diseases without assessing the lung itself. In 2007, Spira co-founded a BU start-up company, Allegro Diagnostics Inc., with Jerome Brody, MD, leading to commercialization of this lung cancer detection test (PerceptaTM) in April 2015.
Beyond the “bench to bedside” success in developing a lung cancer detection tool, Spira’s lab, co-led by Marc Lenburg, PhD, Professor of Medicine, has developed biomarkers for monitoring disease activity and personalizing management of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and has identified a novel COPD therapeutic that is currently in the advanced stages of preclinical development.
Spira obtained his MD from McGill University in Montreal, and completed his Internal medicine residency at the University of Toronto and his fellowship in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at BMC. During his fellowship, Spira obtained a master’s degree in Bioinformatics from Boston University.
He serves as Principal Investigator on grants from the National Cancer Institute (NCI); National Heart, Lung, Blood Institute (NHLBI), National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and the Department of Defense (DoD), and has authored close to 100 papers.
Spira is a member of the NIH’s Cancer Biomarker Study Section (CBSS), Senior Editor at Cancer Prevention Research as well as Associate Editor at the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. He was elected a member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI) in 2010. He recently was selected to serve on the NIH/NIEHS Advisory Council.