Pashtoon Murtaza Kasi, MD, MS
Division of Hematology, Oncology, University of Iowa Health Care, Iowa City, IA, USA
Dr. Pashtoon M. Kasi is an Assistant Professor at the college of Medicine and Oncology at The University of Iowa. He did his internal medicine residency at the University of Pittsburgh followed by Oncology and Hematology fellowship at the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN. In parallel Doctor Kasi completed a Post-Doctoral Master’s in Clinical and Translational Sciences from the Mayo School of Graduate Medical Education.
His niche from a research and practice standpoint has been the focus on “liquid biopsies” – circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) testing. From his initial serendipitous beginnings into this field, Dr. Kasi has been able to integrate this area of research into standard care and clinical trials for the patients he treats with gastrointestinal cancers. This has allowed for rapid, dynamic and noninvasive identification of mutational changes in a particular patient’s tumor, allowing for therapy to be individualized as the tumor evolves. Clinical trials incorporating liquid biopsy platforms are under development as an outcome from these efforts and some already open and accruing. These include trials incorporating ctDNA into the minimal residual disease (MRD) setting. Furthermore, his work has generated insights on how best to use and integrate this technology into research and practice, including factors pertaining to concordance of these assays. He is also the Co-PI of the GI Molecular Epidemiology Resource Core (MERC) at the University of Iowa which has been accruing and maintaining a cohort of cancer patients/biobank in order to support a broad range of cutting-edge research that identifies clinical, epidemiologic, host genetic, tumor, and treatment factors that impact on short- and long-term outcomes.
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Terms of Appointment: June 2020 - May 2022