Ignacio Garrido-laguna MD, PhD, MBA

Ignacio Garrido-Laguna, MD, PhD, MBA, is a Professor of Oncology with tenure at the University of Utah School of Medicine and a member of the Experimental Therapeutics Program at Huntsman Cancer Institute (HCI). At HCI, he sees patients with gastrointestinal cancers and patients enrolled in Phase I trials.

Dr. Garrido-Laguna’s primary research interest is pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC). Since Dr. Garrido-Laguna's arrival at HCI in 2011, accrual of PDAC patients to clinical trials has increased from less than 5% in 2011 to consistently 15%. He is the PI of multiple clinical trials, including novel therapies such as immunotherapies that hold promise in the treatment of this disease. His research team's work in drug development for pancreatic cancer is focused on five different areas. They coined the PRIME acronym to refer to these areas (Nevala-Plagemann, Nat Rev Clin Oncol 2020). P for Pathway inhibitors, R for DNA Repair agents, I for Immunotherapy, M for drugs targeting cancer metabolism, and E for drugs targeting the extracellular matrix. At HCI, patients with pancreatic cancer can participate in clinical trials targeting each of these pancreatic cancer vulnerabilities.

In 2018, his team and collaborators reported exceptional responses to entrectinib among patients with advanced pancreatic cancer whose tumors harbored NTRK/ROS1 fusions (Pishvaian et al JCO Precision Oncology 2018). This work was part of an early phase trial that led to FDA approval of entrectinib in patients with solid tumors with NTRK fusions (Doebele et al., Lancet Oncology 2020).

Dr. Garrido-Laguna is a member of the GI Committee at SWOG. In collaboration with Dr. Sohal from the University of Cincinnati and Dr.Beatty from the University of Pennsylvania, he is conducting a translational medicine study using samples from SWOG1505 to evaluate immunologic predictors of therapeutic response to neoadjuvant therapy for pancreatic cancer.

He is a Principal Investigator in more than 15 phase 1 clinical trials. This includes an ongoing investigator-initiated study to evaluate a RAS signature in patients with KRAS-positive metastatic colorectal cancer treated with Folfiri plus a MEK inhibitor. Dr. Garrido-Laguna received his medical degree from the School of Medicine of Universidad de Navarra, Pamplona, ​​Spain. He then completed his internship and residency in Internal Medicine-Medical Oncology at Hospital Universitario 12 de Octubre in Madrid, Spain.

Before joining HCI, Dr. Garrido-Laguna was a clinical fellow in the Phase I program at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. He completed his postdoctoral fellowship in the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins. While at Hopkins, he worked extensively in patient-derived xenografts. His research showed that stroma (tissue around the tumor that gives nutrition to cancer cells) is involved in resistance to chemotherapy in pancreatic cancer.