Steven Piantadosi, MD, PhD

Brigham And Women's Hospital

Academic Titles

Professor in Residence, Surgery, Harvard Medical School

Research Program Affiliation

Member, Developmental Therapeutics

Member, Cancer Data Sciences

Research Abstract

I am an experienced clinical trial methodologist and scientist with 37 years in research and health care leadership. Innovative clinical trials are my special interest. My career has touched a very large number of clinical trials of all types, including multi-center and international trials, academic portfolios, and regulatory issues. Although much of my work has been in cancer, I have participated regularly in clinical trials in other disciplines such as neurodegenerative diseases, and cardiovascular disease. The constant theme is trial methodology.

From 2008-2017, I was Director of the Samuel Oschin Cancer Institute at Cedars Sinai Medical Center, a UCLA teaching hospital, and the largest hospital in the western U.S. The Cancer Center sees about 5500 new cases each year with a pluralistic faculty that is a mix of full time appointees, hospital-owned delivery network physicians, and private practitioners.

My personal research focus has always been in clinical trials methods. I have had a focus on translational and early developmental trials. In addition to collaborative work, I am a co-investigator on an NCI R01addressing designs for dose-finding with two or more agents simultaneously. I taught Clinical Trials in the Specialty Training and Research (STaR) program at UCLA for 7 years, and my textbook on clinical trials is recently published in its 3rd edition. It has become a standard in the field. I have also taught extensively in national workshops focused on training of clinical investigators in both cancer and neurologic disease, and I am a Fellow of the Society for Clinical Trials. Prior to 2007, I was a division head in the Johns Hopkins Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center where I founded and built the Biostatistics and Bioinformatics programs. I was Professor of Oncology in the School of Medicine as well as Professor of Biostatistics, and Epidemiology in the Hopkins School of Public Health. In 20 years at Hopkins I was funded on collaborative and original peer-reviewed research from dozens of NIH grants. There I also taught Clinical Trials in the Graduate Training Program in Clinical Research, mentored many clinical research fellows, and supervised doctoral research in biostatistics and epidemiology. I am a founding member of the New Approaches to Brian Tumor Therapy Consortium (now Adult Brain Tumor Group) which has had nearly 25 years of NCI funding.