Background
Dr. Nickolas Papadopoulos is a professor of oncology and pathology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. His research focuses on cancer biology, genetics and diagnostics. Dr. Papadopoulos is internationally known as a co-discoverer of the genetic basis of the predisposition to hereditary nonpolyposis colon cancer (HNPCC), one of the most common hereditary forms of cancer, earlier in his career. He was part of the interdisciplinary team that was first to sequence all of the protein coding genes, determine genetic alterations and construct expression profiles of four common tumor types. Later he was involved in the identification of genetic alterations that drive tumorigenesis in multiple tumor types. His noteworthy discoveries include the identification of novel mutations in chromatin remodeling genes in ovarian clear cell carcinomas and pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors.
He is currently engaged in translating the genetic information derived from cancer genome analyses to clinical applications in early detection, diagnosis and monitoring of cancer. He is a co-developer of sensitive methods for the detection of tumor DNA in liquid biopsy. Dr. Papadopoulos developed CancerSEEK, a blood test for the early detection of multiple cancers, and he is the co-founder of two companies that develop diagnostics for cancer.
Dr. Papadopoulos received his B.S. from Aristotelion University of Thessaloniki in Greece. He earned his M.S. in biology at the University of Houston and his Ph.D. in biomedical sciences at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. He completed a Fogerty Fellowship at the National Institute on Aging and a postdoctoral fellowship in oncology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Dr. Papadopoulos joined the Johns Hopkins faculty in 2005.
He serves as an advisor to Science Translational Medicine and is a peer reviewer for a number of publications, including The American Journal of Pathology, Cancer Research and Genomics. His work has been recognized with multiple AACR Team Science Awards, the Dr. George N. Papanicolaou Award from the Hellenic Medical Society and the Director’s Teaching Award in Laboratory-Based Science from Johns Hopkins.