Shailender Bhatia

Shailender Bhatia is a medical oncologist and close collaborator of Paul Nghiem who has led clinical investigations into combination immunotherapy strategies for Merkel cell carcinoma. He has studied the addition of radiation to checkpoint inhibitors for in-transit and recurrent MCC and has coordinated correlative biology studies examining antigen-specific T-cell responses in MCC patients on immunotherapy. His work has helped define optimal sequencing of avelumab and pembrolizumab in the relapsed/refractory setting and the role of PD-L1 as a biomarker.