Scott Armstrong has been named senior vice president for Drug Discovery and chief research strategy officer at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute shared on LinkedIn:
“Scott Armstrong has been named senior vice president for Drug Discovery and chief research strategy officer at Dana-Farber. In this role, he will help lead the Institute’s research plans and efforts with an initial focus on therapeutic discovery work.
“This new position is a direct outgrowth of Dana-Farber’s previous success in drug discovery and development,” states Armstrong. “Now is the time to build on that success and make our investments in drug discovery more impactful for patients.”
Dana-Farber investigators played a substantial role in developing more than half of all cancer drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) over the past five years. Those efforts involve research into the basic biology of cancer on one end of the spectrum, and clinical trials of new therapeutic agents for patients on the other.
A critical part of Dana-Farber’s drug-discovery efforts are the labs that specialize in the discovery of novel therapeutic approaches that interfere with the biology that drives cancer growth.
‘The labs focused on drug discovery connect our world-class basic biological science research and clinical and translational research,’ explains Armstrong. ‘This is a unique type of science, and we at Dana-Farber have the expertise to do it.’
Armstrong collaborated with labs involved with all three of these forms of scientific investigation at the Institute to develop new agents called menin inhibitors for acute myelogenous leukemia (AML). It is expected that this year, the FDA will approve the first of these drugs for the treatment of adults and children with common subtypes of aggressive forms of AML.”