Dr. Massimo Loda, chair of the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and the David D. Thompson Professor at Weill Cornell Medicine, has been elected to the National Academy of Medicine.
One of the most prestigious honors in health and medicine, the academy recognizes individuals who have demonstrated outstanding professional achievement and made major contributions to advancing the medical sciences, health care and public health.
“Election to the National Academy of Medicine is extremely prestigious, and I’m very thankful,” said Dr. Loda, also pathologist-in-chief at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center. “It is an honor and recognition that goes beyond the institution—it’s more of a global recognition of one’s accomplishments.”
Massimo Loda, M.D.
David D. Thompson Professor & Chairman of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Weill Cornell Medicine
Dr. Loda’s renowned work has illuminated the mechanisms by which prostate cancer hijacks cell metabolism to allow tumors to flourish. Unlike healthy cells, prostate tumors rely on fat, or lipids, for energy. Dr. Loda discovered that targeting this molecular pathway makes tumor cells vulnerable to cell death, leading to drugs that exploit this metabolic mechanism with few side effects. Dr. Loda has also identified prostate cancer biomarkers that can predict the effectiveness of specific therapies.
“The re-wiring of metabolism in cancer to support its growth has always been a fascination of mine,” he said. “We discovered that tumors are entirely dependent on certain fatty acids and have spent the last 25 years figuring out why. This has evolved to clinical trials using pharmacologic agents that target a critical metabolic enzyme in patients with prostate cancer. It’s been an interesting path.”
After completing his medical degree and residency in surgery at the University of Milan, Dr. Loda completed a residency in anatomic pathology at Harvard Medical School as well as a fellowship at Tufts University focused on molecular pathology, a nascent discipline at the time. The field seemed an ideal fit since it allowed him to combine research and clinical care, focusing on pathogenetic mechanisms of disease.
“I’m interested in cancer pathogenesis and how this affects patients’ therapeutic options and outcome, and pathology gives you the opportunity to bring the question back to the lab and investigate it,” he said. “The choice of pathology as a discipline was, for me, perfect to achieve this goal.”
Dr. Loda joined Weill Cornell Medicine in 2019 after serving as a professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School, now with Emeritus status, serving as a urologic pathologist at the
Brigham & Women’s Hospital, chairing the Department of Oncologic Pathology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and serving as a co-leader of the Prostate Program at Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center. He has received several honors, including the Donald S. Coffey Physician-Scientist Award from the Prostate Cancer Foundation, the Newton Abraham Professorship at the University of Oxford, Lincoln College and membership to the Association of American Physicians. He has published more than 450 scholarly papers in leading journals. He has also served on several national advisory boards, leads the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Pathology Working Group and was a standing member of the Tumor Cell Biology study section at the National Cancer Institute.
Dr. Loda now wants to build on his vast body of work by expanding the early-phase clinical trials he’s currently leading, to achieve co-targeting of oncogenic drivers and metabolic enzymes in prostate cancer patients. He hopes his research will lead to additional targeted prostate cancer treatments.
“In oncology, we’ve shifted in the last 20 or 30 years from a diagnosis of cancer that was simply organ-specific, treated with relatively low specificity and undesired side-effects, to a biology-driven more granular and complex understanding of many more subtypes of cancer. Subtypes which may respond differently to different drugs or combination of therapeutic agents—including targeting lipid metabolism,” he said. “There’s been an evolution in this area, and I feel privileged to have contributed.”