Sunil Sharma, joined the Translational Genomics Research Institute, pursuing drug development and patient clinical trials in concert with TGen’s research alliance with City of Hope in California, and TGen’s clinical partnership with the HonorHealth Research Institute in Scottsdale.
Sharma most recently was deputy director of Huntsman Cancer Institute in Salt Lake City, an NCI-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center. Previously he served as senior director of clinical research and director of the Center for Investigational Therapeutics at HCI, where he also held a Jon and Karen Huntsman Presidential Professorship in Cancer Research and taught at the University of Utah School of Medicine. He helped HCI receive a coveted Comprehensive Cancer Center designation from the NCI in 2015.
Sharma is TGen deputy director of Clinical Sciences, and will work with closely with Daniel Von Hoff, TGen Distinguished Professor and Physician-In-Chief. Sharma will hold the titles of professor and head of TGen’s Applied Cancer Research and Drug Discovery Program.
He also will be a professor of medicine at City of Hope, and serve as chief of translational oncology and drug development at the HonorHealth Research Institute. He will be part of the senior leadership for the TGen-City of Hope alliance.
Before joining the Huntsman Cancer Institute, Sharma built a phase I clinical trials program at the Nevada Cancer Institute in Las Vegas and worked as a physician in the Division of Gastrointestinal Oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. He earned his medical degree at the University of Delhi in New Delhi, India.
In addition to his clinical work, he worked for Novartis, where he helped developed one of the most widely used anti-lung cancer agents, ceritinib, and recent immunotherapies, pembrolizumab and nivolumab, which help the body’s own immune system attack cancer cells.
Sharma also helped start two drug development firms — Beta Cat Pharmaceuticals, and Salarius Pharmaceuticals — each initiated under nearly $20 million grants from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas.
