Dr. Shuji Ogino is the 2018 recipient of the American Society for Investigative Pathology (ASIP) Outstanding Investigator Award. This prestigious award recognizes mid-career investigators with demonstrated excellence in research in experimental pathology. Dr. Ogino describes himself as "…a molecular pathological epidemiologist with a major research effort and 20% clinical effort in molecular diagnostics/ molecular genetic pathology." This confluence of molecular pathology and epidemiology has inspired and shaped his career. Drawing upon his expertise in both, Dr. Ogino unified the two disciplines to develop a new paradigm for investigating cancer and a new integrative field of study, which he calls "Molecular Pathological Epidemiology (MPE)." According to Dr. Ogino, his objective is to elucidate the etiology and progression of complex and heterogeneous human diseases at the molecular, individual, and population levels by employing MPE, which integrates theory, methods, and resources from various other disciplines to inform and enhance preventative and therapeutic efforts. Dr. Ogino has received funding from the National Cancer Institute and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute to develop MPE as both a method and a discipline.
Colorectal cancer (CRC) has served as a practical model for Dr. Ogino's MPE research. As part of his transdisciplinary investigation into the pathogenesis and progression of CRC, he endeavors to understand the role that environment, diet, lifestyle, and medical and genetic factors play in the incidence, mortality, and clinical outcomes of CRC. Dr. Charles S. Fuchs, Director of the Yale Cancer Center and former Chief of Gastrointestinal Oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, extolled Dr. Ogino's contribution to two large (>170,000 participants) longitudinal cohort studies at the Harvard School of Public Health: the all-female Nurses' Health Study and the all-male Health Professionals Follow-Up Study, which evaluate, respectively, women's and men's health by relating nutritional and other factors to the incidence of serious illnesses. According to Dr. Fuchs, Dr. Ogino directed his laboratory to perform molecular analysis on the tumor specimens of participants diagnosed with colorectal cancer and colorectal adenomas from which he created a comprehensive, high-dimensional CRC database that showed the benefit of several medications and lifestyle factors on CRC prevention and patient survival. Further, he developed molecular markers that provide insight into how certain factors influence CRC risk and patient survival, and biomarkers that predict whether a specific factor will likely improve patient outcomes. By conducting whole exome sequencing on >1,000 CRC specimens, Dr. Ogino identified new mutations that are now the subject of ongoing clinical trials. This multidimensional genomic analysis of clinically annotated patient specimens has provided a broader understanding of colorectal cancer biology.
Dr. Ogino is a board-certified molecular genetics pathologist who earned his medical degree from the University of Tokyo in 1993, followed by a PhD in Pathology and Pathogenesis from the University of Tokyo in 2001, and a master's degree in Epidemiology from Harvard School of Public Health in 2010. Dr. Ogino is a Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at Harvard's TH Chan School of Public Health, a Professor of Pathology at Harvard Medical School, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and Brigham and Women's Hospital, Chief of Molecular Pathological Epidemiology (MPE) in the Department of Pathology at Brigham and Women's Hospital, and an Associate Member at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. He also serves as a member of both the Medical Oncology and Oncologic Pathology faculties at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He has received numerous awards and honors, including the Ramzi Cotran Young Investigator Award (2011) from the United States and Canadian Academy of Pathology (USCAP), and the Executive Officer's Award (2004) and Meritorious Service Award (2012) from the Association for Molecular Pathology (AMP). He has also been selected by Thomson Reuters as one of the Most Influential Scientific Minds (2014) and as a Highly-Cited Researcher (2015). In addition, he is an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation.
Dr. Ogino will receive the Outstanding Investigator Award at the ASIP 2018 Annual Meeting at Experimental Biology in San Diego, California on Monday, April 23 from 5:15 PM to 6:30 PM and will present his award lecture, "Integrative Immunology-Molecular Pathological Epidemiology: Frontier for Pathobiological Discovery from Big Data," on Tuesday, April 24 from 2:00 PM to 3:00 PM, both in Room 2 of the San Diego Convention Center.