Keith Flaherty

Keith Flaherty, MD is a Professor of Medicine at the Harvard Medical School and Director of Clinical Research at the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center. As described in the more than 300 peer-reviewed primary research reports he has authored or co-authored, Dr. Flaherty and colleagues made several seminal observations that have defined the treatment of melanoma when they established the efficacy of BRAF, MEK, and combined BRAF/MEK inhibition in patients with metastatic melanoma in a series of New England Journal of Medicine articles for which Dr. Flaherty was the first or senior author.

Dr. Flaherty also has been a leader in assessing and identifying mechanisms of de novo and acquired resistance to BRAF inhibitor therapy and clinically evaluating next-generation inhibitors, work that has had implications for resistance to targeted therapy regimens used to treat other malignant diseases. He served as the principal investigator of the NCI MATCH trial, the first NCI-sponsored trial assigning patients to targeted therapy independent of tumor type on the basis of DNA sequencing detection of oncogenes.

Dr. Flaherty serves Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group (ECOG) as chair of the Developmental Therapeutics Committee and in 2013 was appointed as ECOG Deputy Chair for Biomarker Science. Dr. Flaherty joined the NCI Board of Scientific Advisors in 2018 and AACR Board of Directors in 2019. He serves as editor-in-chief of Clinical Cancer Research.

In 2013 Dr. Flaherty co-founded Loxo Oncology, served on the Board of Directors, and chaired the Scientific Advisory board until its acquisition by Eli Lilly for $8 billion. He is co-founder of Strata Oncology, X4 Pharmaceuticals, Apricity, and Scorpion Therapeutics.

Dr. Flaherty earned a medical degree from Johns Hopkins University, trained in internal medicines at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and completed a medical oncology fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania.