Shahin Rafii MD

Dr. Rafii received his undergraduate degree from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and his medical training from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. He carried out additional postdoctoral work at nearby Weill Cornell Medical College, also in New York, where he currently holds professorships in reproductive medicine, medicine, and genetic medicine. His work is focused primarily on identifying the molecular and cellular pathways involved in organ regeneration and tumor growth. Dr. Rafii’s laboratory uses in vivo mouse models and tissue-culture approaches to model the mechanisms by which dysregulation of the tumor vascular niche drives metastasis. Findings from his laboratory set forth the novel proposition that signals driving tumorigenesis are not cancer-cell autonomous. In fact, tumor endothelial cells establish a malignant vascular niche that supplies protumorigenic growth factors known as angiocrine factors, thus dictating cancer cell stemness and progression as well as metastasis. His group has shown that tumor endothelial cells aberrantly produce angiocrine factors that stimulate Notch and Wnt signaling in tumor cells. These studies explain why targeting oncogenes alone has been ineffective in regressing tumor growth, and why the normalization of tumor vascular-niche function is essential to block tumor growth and metastasis.