Eileen M. O'Reilly

Eileen M. O'Reilly, MD is Section Head of Hepatopancreaticobiliary Cancers and holds the Winthrop Rockefeller Chair in Medical Oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, with a joint appointment as Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College. She is internationally recognized as one of the foremost clinical investigators in pancreatic cancer and biliary tract malignancies. Dr. O'Reilly led the landmark POLO trial (Pancreatic Cancer Olaparib Ongoing, published in NEJM 2019), a phase III randomized study demonstrating that maintenance olaparib — a PARP inhibitor — significantly prolonged progression-free survival compared with placebo in patients with germline BRCA1/2-mutated metastatic pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) who had not progressed on platinum-based chemotherapy. POLO established the first molecularly selected maintenance strategy in PDAC and contributed to the FDA approval of olaparib in this setting, representing a paradigm shift toward precision oncology for a historically intractable disease. Beyond POLO, Dr. O'Reilly has led or co-led numerous phase I, II, and III trials evaluating targeted agents, immunotherapy combinations, stromal-targeting strategies, and novel chemotherapy regimens in pancreatic and biliary cancers. She has been a principal investigator of MSK's Know Your Tumor program, investigating real-world outcomes of comprehensive genomic profiling in PDAC. She serves in leadership roles for the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO), and the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network (PanCAN) scientific advisory community, and has authored more than 200 peer-reviewed publications.