David Cheresh

Dr. Cheresh is Distinguished Professor and Vice-Chair of Pathology at the Moores Cancer Center in the University of California, San Diego. He is also Director for Translational Research at the Moores UCSD Cancer Center. Prior to relocating his laboratory in 2005, Dr. Cheresh was a professor in the Departments of Immunology and Vascular Biology at The Scripps Research Institute, focusing on the role of adhesion receptors and growth factors in the angiogenesis of tumors. Dr. Cheresh received his doctorate in Immunology from the University of Miami in Florida. In 1982, he joined The Scripps Research Institute as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Immunology and moved up through the ranks where he became Professor in 1996. Dr. Cheresh is the recipient of various awards including the 15th Hans Linder Memorial Lecture from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, the XXIII Annual Myron Karon Memorial Lectureship from the University of Southern California, the Robert Flynn Professorship Award from Tufts University School of Medicine, the Judah Folkman lectureship, the Paget-Ewing award from the Metastasis Research Society/AACR and was a recipient of The American Cancer Society Faculty Research Award and a Merit Award from the National Cancer Institute.

Dr. Cheresh studies the mechanism of action of signaling networks that regulate angiogenesis, tumor growth, stemness, drug resistance and metastasis. He discovered that integrin ανβ3 is a functional marker of angiogenic blood vessels. His work is both basic and translational focusing on new strategies for biologically-based drug development including the development of several drugs now in various stages of clinical development. Dr. Cheresh’s research has been widely cited with seven of his peer-reviewed publications being cited over 1,000 times. Dr. Cheresh was the scientific founder of TargeGen, a San Diego-based biotechnology company, which developed a number of small molecules based in part on discoveries made in the Cheresh laboratory. TargeGen’s JAK2 inhibitor has shown clinical activity in patients with the myeloproliferative disease and has met its primary endpoint in a Phase III registration trial. Most recently, Dr. Cheresh and his colleagues have developed a novel scaffold-based chemistry approach to stabilize kinases in their inactive state. These studies have led to the discovery of a first-in-class RAF inhibitor that has distinct advantages relative to ATP mimetics of RAF.