Professor of Surgery, University of South Florida, and Associate Center Director for Translational Research and Innovation at the Tampa General Hospital Cancer Institute 

I was most recently the Executive Medical Director Oncologic Services and the Senior Medical Director for the Oncology Clinical Program at Intermountain Healthcare (2019-2021), collaborating with the Huntsman Cancer Institute. Earlier in my career, I spent 20 years at Moffitt Cancer Center as a physician scientist and executive, with a clinical and research focus on deciphering the molecularly-defined subpopulations of colorectal cancer that help diagnose and predict CRC outcomes and drug sensitivities.  My research has been translational in nature, integrating RNA and DNA sequencing profiles derived from CRC patients into signatures and mathematical scores, translating these human tumor-based observations into the laboratory , and then back into the clinic. Thus, we have focused on using multi-omics molecular analyses of thousands of CRCs as a “best in class” model from which translational hypotheses can be generated.  Through our decade long collaborations with Merck, we have access to hundreds of gene expression signatures that help characterized the biological subclasses of CRC.  Most recently, my laboratory has ventured into a new direction, to begin profiling the lipidome of human tumors using quantitative LC-MS/MS.  Our analyses have been tightly focused on the arachidonic acid pathway linked to the Western diet and its imbalance of pro-inflammatory > pro-resolving mediators.  We recently published a high impact article in GUT evaluating the landscape of CRC lipidomics in ~162 CRC patient tumor + normal paired samples with untargeted and targeted, quantitative LC-MS/MS, and have identified a large inflammatory bias in CRC with a marked deficit of pro-resolving mediators leading to a state of chronic inflammation and immunosuppression. We were recently awarded a new UO1 proposal that will extend this promising translational work.  We now believe that modulation of the immune system via lipid signaling and other metabolites is the key to cancer cures, as evidenced by immune checkpoint inhibitors alone---without surgery, chemotherapy or radiotherapy---curing some forms of rectal cancer.  We propose that diet is critical to human immune health, directing the microbiome constitution and its key metabolites. A multitude of microbiome metabolites directly interact with immune system via its vast gut interface, actively informing it throughout the human lifespan.