Vinod P. Balachandran MD, FACS

Vinod P. Balachandran, MD is a surgeon-scientist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Dr. Balachandran completed his undergraduate work in Physics at Cornell University, his MD at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, general surgery residency at Weill Cornell’s NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, and fellowship training in surgical oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. During his surgery training, he pursued postdoctoral work in tumor immunology at the Sloan Kettering Institute, where he identified that kinase inhibitors had partial immune-mediated anti-tumor effects, providing key evidence that kinase inhibitors can be combined with immunotherapy.

In 2015, Dr. Balachandran joined Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center as faculty, where he now serves as a principal investigator in the Immuno-Oncology Service of the Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program (HOPP) and an Assistant Attending Surgeon in the Hepatopancreatobiliary Service in the Department of Surgery. In the clinic, he specializes in the surgical and oncologic care of pancreatic cancer patients and conducts immunotherapy clinical trials. In the laboratory, he leads a basic and translational research program focused on the discovery and application of next-generation cancer immunotherapies for pancreatic cancer.

Vinod laboratory studies rare long-term pancreatic cancer survivors and has uncovered key antigens and cells in these patients’ tumors that contribute to their exceptional outcomes, findings that are now being translated into therapies for patients. For his work, he has received an American Association of Cancer Research Career Development Award, a Damon Runyon Clinical Investigator Award, a National Cancer Institute Cancer Moonshot Award, and a Stand Up to Cancer Phillip A. Sharp Innovation Award.