Alice T. Shaw

Alice T. Shaw, MD, PhD is Director of the Thoracic Oncology Service at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. She is recognized globally as the leading clinical scientist in ALK-rearranged non-small cell lung cancer, having driven the development of virtually every generation of ALK inhibitor from crizotinib through lorlatinib. Dr. Shaw co-led the pivotal clinical trials and translational studies that established crizotinib as the first approved ALK inhibitor, and subsequently contributed to J-ALEX and ALEX trials showing alectinib's superiority over crizotinib including dramatic CNS activity. Her most transformative contribution may be the clinical development of lorlatinib, the third-generation brain-penetrant ALK/ROS1 inhibitor: her team conducted the phase I/II studies defining lorlatinib's dose, activity spectrum, and CNS efficacy, and she co-designed the CROWN trial in which lorlatinib demonstrated unprecedented 5-year PFS rates as first-line therapy in ALK+ NSCLC. Dr. Shaw also pioneered serial tumor biopsy and ctDNA studies to characterize compound resistance mutations in ALK, identifying the G1202R solvent-front mutation as a dominant mechanism of resistance to second-generation ALK inhibitors and demonstrating lorlatinib activity against this resistance profile. She has authored more than 200 publications and is an editorial board member of the Journal of Clinical Oncology and Cancer Discovery.