Academic History

Roy Herbst, MD, PhD, is the Director of Dartmouth Cancer Center, Lebanon, NH, having previously been the Deputy Director of Yale Cancer Center, New Haven, CT. Dr Herbst completed his medical degree at Cornell University Medical College, and his PhD in Molecular Cell Biology at Rockefeller University, both in New York, NY. He then completed his internship and residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, MA. Following this, Dr Herbst completed clinical fellowships at both Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, MA, and subsequently, an MS degree in Clinical Translational Research at Harvard University, Boston, MA.

Dr Herbst is a Fellow of the American Society of Clinical Oncology and a member of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), for which he serves as Chair of the Science Policy and Government Affairs Committee. He has also served on the Board of Directors of the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancers and AACR, and is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians.

Speaking on development in targeted and immune-based therapies for lung cancers

Dr Herbst’s research focuses on targeted therapies and immunotherapies for the treatment of lung cancer. He has been involved as a principal investigator in several international clinical trials investigating practice-changing therapies, including gefitinib, cetuximab and bevacizumab, erlotinib and axitinib. Dr Herbst led the landmark ADAURA trial, which established osimertinib as a standard-of-care adjuvant therapy for early-stage resected non-small cell lung cancer. In addition, he was the founding principal investigator of the Lung Master Protocol (Lung-MAP), a precision medicine trial designed to identify patient biomarkers to guide treatment decisions. His group was also among the first to describe the PD-1/PD-L1 adaptive immune response, which helped pave the way for checkpoints inhibitors in lung cancer.