Tanios S. Bekaii-saab MD, FACP

Dr. Tanios S. Bekaii-Saab, MD, FACP, is the David F. and Margaret T. Grohne Professor of Novel Therapeutics for Cancer Research I at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science. He is the Chairman for the Division of Hematology/Medical Oncology at the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix, Arizona, USA. He is the co-leader of the Advanced Clinical and Translational Science Program and the Disease Group Leader for Gastrointestinal Cancers for the Enterprise-wide Mayo Clinic Cancer Center. Dr. Bekaii-Saab is currently the co-leader of the Hepatobiliary Cancer Sub-Committee of the Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology and the Co-Chair for the National Cancer Institute’s Hepatobiliary Task Force.

Dr. Bekaii-Saab earned his medical degree from the American University of Beirut in Lebanon and completed a residency in internal medicine at Indiana University Medical Center in Indianapolis, Indiana, USA. He then completed fellowships in clinical pharmacology and experimental therapeutics and hematology/oncology at Tufts University/New England Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Before joining Mayo, Dr. Bekaii-Saab was a fully tenured professor of Medicine and Pharmacy at the Ohio State University/ James Cancer Hospital.

Dr. Bekaii-Saab conducts clinical and translational research focused on developing anticancer agents for patients with gastrointestinal cancers. His research led to the launch of several phase II and III clinical trials, many yielding FDA approvals and the incorporation of novel agents into the NCCN and ESMO guidelines.

His work also includes two discoveries as co-inventor of a pan-HDAC inhibitor (AR-42) and an anti-PD-1 vaccine (PD-Vaxx), which has resulted in licensing opportunities (under patents: US6387883B1, EP3600389A1, WO2019055687A1, ES2729619T3, and others). AR42 (REC-2282) is licensed to Recursion and is undergoing clinical development in a phase III study in Neurofibromatosis Type II.

Dr. Bekaii-Saab served as a reviewer for many high-impact journals and sits on the editorial board of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.  Dr. Bekaii-Saab has authored or co-authored more than 600 peer-reviewed publications, abstracts, and book chapters, including papers in such journals as New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, Nature Medicine, The Lancet Oncology, Journal of Clinical Oncology, JAMA, Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Annals of Oncology, and Cancer Discovery.