Jenna Canzoniero, MD

Dung Le, M.D. is a professor of oncology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and member of the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center. Her research interests include novel approaches to patients with gastrointestinal malignancies. She has served as the principal investigator (PI) on many clinical trials focused on testing immunotherapy in patients with gastrointestinal malignancies and she has also served as the national PI on several studies including: anti-programmed death-1 (PD-1) in tumors with mismatch repair deficiency; a clinical trial in advanced pancreatic cancer patients evaluating the safety, tolerability and immune response to CRS-207, a listeria vaccine platform which has been modified to express the tumor antigen mesothelin; a multi-center, phase 2 study testing CRS-207 as a boost to allogenic pancreatic tumor cells transfected with GM-CSF gene (GVAX) for treatment of advanced pancreatic adenocarcinoma (PDA); a trial testing GVAX/ipilimumab in the maintenance setting for metastatic pancreatic cancer; and GVAX/CRS-207 +/- nivolumab in metastatic pancreatic cancer.These studies incorporate extensive laboratory correlates and have involved collaborations with clinicians and bench scientists with expertise in the fields of immunotherapy and cancer genomics.

Dr. Ross C. Donehower is an oncologist in the Baltimore area, caring for patients with gastrointestinal cancers. He was part of the team that developed premedications that allowed paclitaxel — a chemotherapy medication now used to treat several types of cancers — to be safely given to patients. The Virginia and D.K. Ludwig Professor in Clinical Investigation of Cancer, he serves as the director of the Hematology & Medical Oncology Fellowship Program and director of the Division of Medical Oncology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.Dr. Donehower received his undergraduate degree from Hamline University and earned his M.D. from the University of Minnesota. He completed his residency at The Johns Hopkins Hospital. Dr. Donehower joined the Johns Hopkins faculty in 1980.Prior to joining Johns Hopkins, Dr. Donehower was a surgeon with the U.S. Public Health Service and a clinical associate of the medicine branch and clinical pharmacology branch at the National Cancer Institute.His research interests include gastrointestinal cancers, new anticancer drug development and pharmacology.Dr. Donehower serves on the editorial boards of numerous scholarly journals, including the International Journal of Oncology. He has been recognized by the American Society of Clinical Oncology with a 2017 Excellence in Teaching Award. He is a member of several professional organizations, including the American College of Physicians, the American Society of Clinical Oncology and the American Association for Cancer Research.

Alexandra (Aly) Strauss is a transplant hepatologist who treats patients with acute and chronic liver disease, such as cirrhosis and liver cancer. Dr. Strauss completed medical school at the University of South Florida (USF), where she continued for internal medicine residency training and served as chief resident. She then went to The Johns Hopkins University for fellowship training in gastroenterology, followed by a fellowship in transplant hepatology. Her research training began when she completed a master’s degree in industrial/systems engineering at USF. Later, at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, she earned her Ph.D. in clinical investigation. Dr. Strauss’s research focus is on the use of systems engineering and data science to improve access to liver transplantation. She serves as core faculty in the Johns Hopkins University Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare and is a faculty member in the Center for Data Science in Emergency Medicine.