Research Abstract
Dr. Joseph Mancias is a radiation oncologist at the Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women's Cancer Center and Assistant Professor of Radiation Oncology at Harvard Medical School. He specializes in the care of gastrointestinal cancer patients including pancreatic cancer patients and runs an independent laboratory at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute focused on the biology of pancreatic cancer.
He received his medical and graduate degrees as part of the Tri-Institutional Weill Cornell/Rockefeller/Sloan-Kettering M.D.-Ph.D. Program earning a Ph.D. degree from the Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences in 2007 and his M.D. from Weill Cornell Medical College in 2008. His internship in Internal Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital was followed by a residency in Radiation Oncology in the combined Harvard Radiation Oncology Program completed in 2013. His postdoctoral research in the laboratories of Dr. Wade Harper in the Department of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School and Dr. Alec Kimmelman in the Department of Radiation Oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute focused on the role of autophagy in pancreatic cancer biology. From 2013-2016, he maintained a focused clinical practice in the Department of Radiation Oncology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center as an Instructor in Radiation Oncology treating patients seen in the BIDMC Pancreatic Cancer Center. Dr. Mancias joined the Department of Radiation Oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in 2016.
Dr. Mancias' research focuses on critical aspects of the biology of pancreatic cancer in order to develop novel therapeutic approaches. The lab takes a comprehensive approach combining biochemical, quantitative mass spectrometry-based proteomic, gene editing, cell biological, and mouse modeling techniques to advance our understanding of the role of selective autophagy and iron metabolism in pancreatic cancer. His research has been published in Nature, Cell, Molecular Cell, eLife, and JAMA Surgery.