Himisha Beltran, MD, a medical oncologist and physician-scientist, is the Director of Clinical and Translational Research at the Englander Institute for Precision Medicine (EIPM) and an Associate Professor of Medicine in the Division of Medical Oncology. Dr. Beltran’s clinical focus is in caring for patients with advanced prostate cancer. Dr. Beltran has a particular focus is next-generation genomic sequencing (NGS) and integrative molecular analysis of advanced metastatic prostate tumors to develop precision cancer care and biomarker driven clinical trials. Her research has brought increased attention to identifying and targeting androgen receptor negative neuroendocrine prostate cancer, an aggressive subtype of prostate cancer. Dr. Beltran has developed novel biomarkers and a multi-institutional Phase 2 trial of a targeted therapy for patients with this form of cancer. Her background in genomics and understanding mechanisms of resistance using genomic and transcriptome approaches have set a foundation for this efforts and she is also focused on utilizing fresh metastatic samples to develop patient-deriver organoid and xenograft models for preclinical drug testing and co-clinical trails.
Currently, Dr. Beltran is developing a research program to study the RNA and DNA of neuroendocrine prostate cancer to learn how these cancers evolve, to identify molecular alterations to target with drugs and develop clinical trials to bring new effective therapy to patients. Dr. Beltran is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Prostate Cancer Foundation Young Investigator Award, AACR Women in Cancer Research Scholar Award, Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology Clinical Scholar Award, Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation Clinical Investigator Award, and an American Society of Clinical Investigation (ASCI) Young Physician Scientist Award.