Valsamo Anagnostou

Dr. Anagnostou is an Assistant Professor of Oncology in the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins. She graduated from the Medical School of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece and received a PhD in cancer biology from the same institution. Dr. Anagnostou completed her internal medicine residency at Yale-New Haven Hospital and subsequently trained in Medical Oncology at Johns Hopkins. She has established the Molecular Oncology laboratory that seeks to understand the genomic wiring of response and resistance to immunotherapy through integrative genomic, transcriptomic, single-cell and liquid biopsy analyses of tumor and immune evolution. She is also the Director of the Thoracic Oncology Biorepository at Johns Hopkins.

Her group has discovered novel mechanisms of response and resistance to immunotherapy and is also developing liquid biopsy assays that capture the dynamics of response and may more accurately predict emergence of resistance to immunotherapy. Her work has provided the foundation for a molecular response-adaptive clinical trial, where therapeutic decisions are made not based on imaging but based on molecular responses derived from liquid biopsies.

Overall, Dr. Anagnostou focuses on studying the temporal and spatial order of the metastatic and immune cascade under the selective pressure of immunotherapy with the ultimate goal to translate this knowledge into “next-generation” immuno-oncology clinical trials and change the way oncologists select patients for these therapies.