Suzanne Topalian, MD

Associate Director, Bloomberg-Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy at Johns Hopkins Medicine

Keynote

Suzanne L. Topalian, MD is a physician-scientist whose studies of anti-tumor immunity have been foundational in developing cancer immunotherapy as a standard-of-care in oncology. She has published over 170 original research articles and reviews in this area and is one of the most highly cited researchers in the biomedical field. She received her medical and scientific training at Tufts University School of Medicine, Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and the National Cancer Institute, NIH. She joined the Johns Hopkins Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center in 2006 as the inaugural director of its Melanoma/Skin Cancer Program. Dr. Topalian currently serves as associate director for the Bloomberg-Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy at Johns Hopkins. She also chairs the scientific advisory panel of the Melanoma Research Alliance, the largest private funder of melanoma research worldwide.

Dr. Topalian is credited with advancing the clinical development of anti-PD-1 cancer immunotherapy, resulting in FDA-approved therapies and associated biomarker tests for patients with over 20 different types of cancer. Her work is widely recognized. She was named one of Nature’s 10 in 2014, and received the Karnofsky Award from the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) in 2015, the Taubman Prize in 2016, the NCI’s Rosalind E. Franklin Award in 2018, the American Academy of Dermatology’s Gruber Memorial Cancer Research Award in 2020, and the Award for Distinguished Research in the Biomedical Sciences from the American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC) in 2021, for landmark discoveries in cancer immunotherapy. Dr. Topalian was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2017, and to the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Academy and the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC) Academy of Immuno-Oncology in 2022.