Matthew Meyerson

What makes Matthew Meyerson a Global Shaker?

In 2014, Dr Matthew Meyerson was named the second-most influential scientist in the world in all fields of science by Thomson Reuters.

He has dedicated his work to using genomic approaches to understand the biology and genetics of human lung carcinomas. More broadly, his laboratory (The Meyerson Lab at Dana-Faber) is focused on cancer genome discovery and pathogen discovery in human disease.

Meyerson is an institute member and director of cancer genomics at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; professor of pathology in the Department of Medical Oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) and Harvard Medical School; and director of the Center for Cancer Genome Discovery at DFCI, where he is also director of cancer genomics.

In 2017, Meyerson became the first Director of Cancer Genomics at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

At Dana-Farber, Meyerson and his colleagues have made major discoveries in cancer genomics, including the discovery of mutations in the EGFR gene that contribute to lung cancer; the discovery of mutations in the gene HLA-A that cause it to lose function in lung cancer and may allow the cancer to evade destruction by the immune system; and the discovery of a connection between the bacterium Fusobacterium nucleatum and colon cancer.

Working closely with colleagues in the Broad’s Cancer Program including Todd Golub, Levi Garraway, William Hahn, and Gad Getz, the Meyerson group has contributed to the discovery of major cancer genes in lung, colon, and breast cancers, leukaemias, and pediatric cancers, many with direct therapeutic implications.

Meyerson has had a longstanding obsession in the discovery of pathogenic microbes. Together with his students he has developed a genomic approach to discover microbial sequences in cryptic infectious diseases called sequence-based computational subtraction. Using this approach, now pursued using high-throughput sequencing technologies at the Broad Institute, Meyerson and his colleagues recently identified bacteria associated with colon carcinomas and with a transplant-associated colitis syndrome.

Meyerson is a principal investigator in The Cancer Genome Atlas project (TCGA) of the National Institutes of Health, leads the lung cancer disease working group of TCGA, and is co-chair of TCGA’s executive committee.

He was part of the manuscript teams for TCGA’s study of the squamous cell lung carcinoma genome, which identified the first somatic mutations of immune regulators in cancer, and the lung adenocarcinoma genome, identifying novel oncogenes in the RTK/Ras/Raf pathway.

Matthew Meyerson has won numerous awards, including the Paul Marks Prize in Cancer Research, which recognizes young scientists who are making seminal contributions to the understanding or treatment of cancer.

Meyerson received his MD in 1993 and PhD in 1994 from Harvard University. After a residency in clinical pathology at Massachusetts General Hospital and a research fellowship with Dr Robert Weinberg at the Whitehead Institute, he joined DFCI in 1998.

Together with Broad colleagues Stuart Schreiber and Andy Phillips, and with colleagues at Bayer HealthCare, Meyerson has initiated a systematic program in genome-inspired cancer drug discovery aimed at creating novel therapeutics for cancer patients.

Last updated: February 6, 2020

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