Michael J. Pishvaian

Michael J. Pishvaian, MD, PhD is Associate Professor of Oncology and Director of the GI Oncology Clinical Trials Program at Johns Hopkins Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center. He is one of the foremost clinical investigators in applying precision oncology and comprehensive genomic profiling to pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, with the goal of identifying actionable molecular alterations that can guide treatment selection and improve outcomes for PDAC patients. Dr. Pishvaian has been a central figure in the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network's (PanCAN) Know Your Tumor (KYT) precision medicine initiative — the largest real-world registry of molecularly profiled PDAC patients in the world. His analyses of the KYT dataset, published in Lancet Oncology (2020), provided the most comprehensive evidence to date that PDAC patients who receive molecularly matched targeted therapy have significantly improved survival compared with patients with actionable alterations who do not receive matched therapy, establishing that approximately one-quarter of PDAC patients harbor potentially actionable alterations and that acting on this information meaningfully changes outcomes. Dr. Pishvaian has also been a clinical investigator for trials of PARP inhibitors, ATR inhibitors, and other DNA damage repair (DDR)-targeted agents in PDAC, particularly in patients with germline or somatic BRCA1/2, PALB2, ATM, or other DDR gene alterations. His translational research has focused on characterizing the landscape of DDR pathway defects in PDAC and their functional consequences for genome stability, therapeutic sensitivity, and immunogenicity.