Joseph Marszalek, Ph.D.
TRACTION
About Dr. Marszalek
Joseph Marzalek, Ph.D., is an industry-trained cancer biologist who has experience across the continuum of drug development, from target discovery through clinical translation. His passion is to work with top scientists and clinicians using state of the art preclinical models to translate novel ideas and agents into new cancer therapies.
Affiliations and Related Links
Fighting Cancer: It's Personal
What makes your fight against cancer personal?
Too many of my friends and family have been stricken with cancer at too young an age. We need more therapeutic options.
What makes the Moon Shots Program stand out?
The program is uniquely invested in people, capabilities and patients in a way that facilitates the creation of multi-disciplinary teams of scientists, researchers and clinicians who are working together to accelerate improvements clinical outcomes. The comprehensive nature of the program, from prevention to novel clinical trial execution, is accelerating improvements in clinical practice.
What motivates and excites you?
We're a drug discovery unit embedded within the #1 clinical cancer hospital. The opportunity to work on a daily basis with some of the best clinicians in the world to discover and translate completely novel insights into potential new therapeutics to change clinical practice keeps me motivated on a daily basis.
What's your Moon Shot focus?
Our goal is to discover novel therapeutic targets, utilize state of the art preclinical models to generate insights into mechanisms of cancer dependency and to identify and validate clinical contexts in which targets are rate limiting. By working with MD Anderson’s world renowned clinicians, we're focused on translating these findings into meaningful clinical endpoints.
What do you hope to accomplish?
Simply put, our primary goal is to generate novel insights and therapeutics that will improve upon current clinical oncology therapies.
What else do you want people to know about you and your work?
I feel blessed to have the opportunity to be a part of the Moon Shots™ effort. As a dedicated part of one of the Moon Shots platforms, my role is to interact with clinicians and scientists across the institution to enable the identification and validatation of therapeutically targetable vulnerabilities that will contribute to Making Cancer History®.