Academia Sinica Logo

Abstract: Mechanisms of resistance reveal the most relevant aspects of cancer biology to the rational design of next-generation pharmacologic agents, combinations, and regimens. Mechanisms of resistance gleaned from advanced cancers can inform the nature of early cancer initiation and clonal evolution, thereby providing targets to detect and intercept cancer evolution earlier during our lifetimes. 

Brief biosketch: Dr. Roger Lo is Professor of Medicine and Molecular and Medical Pharmacology, Associate Chief of Dermatology, and Director of the Dermatology STAR Residency at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine. He immigrated from Taiwan to the United States at the age of eleven and earned his BS in Biology from Stanford (Honors and Distinction) in 1994 and his MD-PhD degrees from the Tri-institutional (Weill Cornell, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and Rockefeller) Program in 2002. After residency and postdoc training at UCLA, he joined the UCLA faculty in 2008, received tenure (UC Full Time Equivalent) in 2014, and rose to full professor in 2016. In 2013, the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) recognized Dr. Lo with the 33^rd Annual Award for Outstanding Achievement in Cancer Research for providing the major scientific rationale toward the use of BRAF and MEK inhibitors in combination to effectively treat melanoma – a therapeutic approach that is now globally considered the standard of care for melanoma and approved by the US FDA for cancer-agnostic indications. Studies from his group have provided rationales for multiple clinical trials. He holds ten patents. His group has been credited with the first studies on the roles of tumor heterogeneity, genomic-epigenomic evolution, and the tumor immune microenvironment in determining clinical responses to current melanoma therapies. His primary research articles have been published in Nature, Nature Medicine, New England Journal of Medicine, Cancer Discovery, Cancer Cell, and Cell. The American Society for Clinical Investigation inducted Dr. Lo into its membership in 2012. In 2017, AACR recognized Dr. Lo’s translational melanoma research with the inaugural AACR-Waun Ki Hong Award for Outstanding Achievement in Cancer Research. In 2019-2021, ClarivateAnalytics (formerly Thomson Reuters) named Dr. Lo a Highly Cited Researcher (HCR). He served on the Editorial Board of Cancer Discovery and chaired the Education Program of the 2021 AACR Annual Meeting. Currently, Dr. Lo serves as the Vice Chair of the Melanoma Committee in the Southwest Oncology Group (SWOG) and on the Scientific Committee of the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO).