Mark Pegram

Dr. Pegram is the first director of the Breast Cancer Oncology Program at Stanford Women’s Cancer Center, and the co-director of Stanford’s Molecular Therapeutics Program. Dr. Pegram commitment to translational science includes having played a major role in developing the drug Herceptin® as a treatment for HER2-positive breast cancer. His laboratory experiments demonstrated that combining Herceptin with chemotherapy effectively killed cancer cells that overproduced the growth factor HER2. Dr. Pegram and others then conducted clinical trials showing that Herceptin improved survival rates and even cured some breast cancer patients. Dr. Pegram’s current research efforts include a continued focus on the cancer-associated gene that encodes HER2 and developing new ways to target cancer cells expressing this protein. Dr. Pegram has numerous publications to his credit.