Luis A. Diaz receives AACR-Waun Ki Hong Award

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Luis A. Diaz has received the AACR-Waun Ki Hong Award for Outstanding Achievement in Translational and Clinical Cancer Research.

Diaz is head of the Division of Solid Tumor Oncology, Grayer Family Chair, and director of the Precision Intervention and Prevention Program at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

Diaz also serves as an attending physician at Memorial Hospital for Cancer and Allied Diseases in New York.

Diaz is being recognized for pioneering novel applications of cancer genomics and circulating tumor DNA for early cancer detection as well as prognosis and recurrence prediction, and for his groundbreaking work involving immune checkpoint blockade in DNA mismatch repair-deficient tumors.

Diaz has focused his career on developing novel genomic approaches to the diagnosis and treatment of cancer. In landmark studies, he demonstrated the potential clinical utility of analyzing ctDNA to detect tumor mutations in the blood, showing that ctDNA could be used to not only track the emergence of mutations conferring therapeutic resistance in patients receiving targeted therapy, but also predict tumor recurrence after surgery.

He has also applied his expertise to expand the use of immunotherapeutics such as immune checkpoint inhibitors in the treatment of patients with cancer. FDA approval of pembrolizumab for advanced MMR-deficient cancers arising in any location in the body was a direct result of Diaz’s research, which showed curative responses in the majority of metastatic patients with MMR-deficient cancers. Diaz is working to harness his cancer genetics knowledge to develop a “molecular Pap test” for the early detection of ovarian and endometrial cancers.

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