David T. Ting, a physician scientist, cancer biologist, and bioengineer, is currently Associate Clinical Director for Innovation and a gastrointestinal oncologist at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Cancer Center. He is currently an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Ting’s lab works on understanding RNA expression patterns in cancer to gain biological insight into the role of tumor heterogeneity in cancer progression, develop biomarkers applicable to the clinic, and to identify novel therapeutic avenues against cancer.  His group uses single cell analytics to understand the relationship of cancer microenvironment and tumor heterogeneity.  In parallel, these single cell technologies have been applicated to circulating tumor cells (CTCs) that have been isolated with microfluidic enrichment technologies to understand the molecular underpinnings of cancer metastasis and provide a path for blood based biomarkers. In addition, his group has discovered the aberrant expression of non-coding repeat RNAs that appear to play an important role in both the tumor microenvironment and metastasis. He has founded 3 biotech companies based on the research in his lab including ROME Therapeutics, PanTher Therapeutics, and TellBio, Inc.

Dr. Ting received his BS in chemical engineering and biology from MIT, and he completed his medical degree at Harvard Medical School from the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology program with magna cum laude honors. During his undergraduate and medical school studies, he trained with Dr. Robert Langer at MIT on drug delivery platforms and did a Howard Hughes Medical Institute fellowship at the Whitehead Institute at MIT working on stem cell biology with Dr. George Daley, current Dean of Harvard Medical School. He completed internal medicine residency at the MGH and medical oncology fellowship in the combined Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and MGH Cancer Center program. He moved on to post-doctoral training with Daniel Haber’s group at the MGH Cancer Center working on CTCs and novel RNA biomarkers in cancer.