Personalizing therapy for colorectal cancer

Heinz-Josef Lenz speaks to Roshaine Gunawardana, Managing Commissioning Editor: Dr Heinz-Josef Lenz is Professor of Medicine and Professor of Preventive Medicine, holds the Kathryn Balakrishnan Chair for Cancer Research, is Associate Director, Clinical Research, Co-Chair of gastrointestinal (GI) Oncology, Co-Director USC Center for Molecular Pathways and Drug Discovery at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine and USC/Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center in Los Angeles (CA, USA). Dr Lenz received his medical degree from Johannes-Gutenberg Universität in Mainz (Germany), and went on to complete a residency in hematology and oncology at the Eberhard-Karls Universität Tübingen (Germany), before completing clerkships in oncology and hematology at George Washington University (DC, USA) and the Beth Israel Hospital of Harvard Medical School (MA, USA), respectively. He completed a postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the USC Keck School of Medicine. Dr Lenz's research focus is in the identification of predictive and prognostic biomarkers in GI cancers, early drug development and novel clinical trials. He is Co-Chair of SWOG GI Committee, Chair SWOG GI Translational Medicine and member of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) GI Steering Committee, NCI Investigational Drug Steering Committee, the NCI Gastroesophageal Task Force and NCI Correlative Science Committee. He is the Principal Investigator for R01, U01, U10 and USC PI for N01. He has been awarded a number of prestigious awards including American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Young Investigator Award, ASCO Career Development Award, NCI Career Development Award, STOP Cancer Career Development Award and Research Recognition Award. He has published over 270 peer reviewed papers including Nature Medicine, Nature Genetics, Journal of Clinical Oncology and Lancet.