Gian-Paolo Dotto, MD, Ph.D.
Director of the Laboratory of Skin Aging and Cancer Prevention, Cutaneous Biology Research Center, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Dermatology Department
Primary Investigator at the Cutaneous Biology Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School
Director of the Personalized Cancer Prevention Research Unit, University of Lausanne, School of Medicine and Biology, Switzerland
Massachusetts General Hospital
Dr Dotto is an elected member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (2011), the Academia Europaea (2012), the Leopoldina German National Academy of Sciences (2014) and an Overseas Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine (2018). He is the recipient of a number of awards, including the American Skin Association Achievement Award (2012), an ERC Advanced investigator grant award (2013) the Jurg Tschopp Award for Excellence in Biological Sciences (2015) and the Life Time Achievement Award from the University of Lausanne, School of Medicine and Biology (2020).
Education, training and positions
Dr. Dotto was educated at the University of Turin, Italy, where he received his MD in 1979. He then earned his PhD in bacteriophage genetics at the Rockefeller University, New York, in 1983. He moved for his postdoctoral training at the Whitehead Institute/MIT in Cambridge Mass. and subsequently joined Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, as assistant professor of Pathology in 1987. He was promoted to the rank of associate professor in 1992 and soon after moved to Harvard Medical School, in the newly established Cutaneous Biology Research Center. In 2000 he obtained the full professorship at Harvard Medical School and a Biologist position at Massachusetts General Hospital. In 2002 he accepted a position of Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Lausanne (UNIL), while retaining his position of Biologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. He has been directing the UNIL PhD program in Cancer and Immunology from 2007 to 2019 and has been responsible for Biochemistry teaching to Medical Students since 2004. Since Aug. 1st 2021 he is honorary professor of the Department of Biochemistry at UNIL. He is founder and director of the International Cancer Prevention Institute, established in Epalinges/Lausanne in 2016.
Scientific contributions
The PI has opened major new perspectives on the complex balance that presides tissue homeostasis and tumorigenesis. His laboratory has been studying the interplay between intracellular and intercellular cell communication pathways that operate in this context, focusing on early steps of skin cancer development as a model. Cancers do not arise solely from a single deregulated cell or group of cells but from more widespread alterations of surrounding tissues. In fact, many genetic changes found in invasive and metastatic tumors are also present in apparently normal tissues and, for reasons that are not yet understood, only a minor fraction of pre-malignant lesions progress to malignancy. In this context, the PI ‘s main research has focused on field cancerization, a process of major clinical significance that consists of multifocal and recurrent tumors associated with widespread changes of surrounding normal tissues, which affects the skin as well as multiple internal organs. On the basis of the bad seed / bad soil hypothesis that he proposed, alterations of both epithelial and stromal cell compartments are involved. His laboratory has pioneered studies on the role that Notch/CSL signaling, a major form of cell-cell communication, plays in both compartments of the skin.
Outreach activities
Dr. Dotto is founder and director of the International Cancer Prevention Institute (IPCI), a new paradigm of teaching / research institute and global forum for educators, policy makers and the general public for development of joint interdisciplinary efforts in primary, secondary and tertiary cancer prevention. He has organized several courses and workshops dedicated to this topic (including a recent EMBO meeting in 2018) and has been a driving force for a new collaborative PhD program on cancer prevention (Marie Curie Innovative Training Network, CANCERPREV) starting November 2019. He has brought to the attention the importance of differences in cancer susceptibility related to sex and ethnic background, two sensitive topics that can be tackled beneficially by rigorous scientific hypotheses and approaches.
Publications
Major Research Interest:
Skin Cancer prevention
Sexual dimorphism in Cancer
Epigenetics
Pre-malignant to malignant tumor conversion
Samarkina A, Youssef MK, Ostano P, Ghosh S, Ma M, Tassone B, Proust T, Chiorino G, Levesque MP, Goruppi S, Dotto GP. Androgen receptor is a determinant of melanoma targeted drug resistance. Nat Commun. 2023.
Ma, M., Ghosh,S., Tavernari, D., Katarkar, A., Clocchiatti, A., Mazzeo,L., Samarkina, A., Epiney, Yu, Y._R. Ho, P.-C., Levesque, M.P. Özdemir, B.C., Ciriello, G., Dummer, R. and G.P. Dotto(2020) Sustained Androgen Receptor signaling is a determinant of melanoma cell growth potential and tumorigenesis. J. Exp. Med. 2021.
Clocchiatti, A., S. Ghosh, M.G. Procopio, L. Mazzeo, P. Bordignon, P. Ostano, S. Goruppi, G. Bottoni, A. Katarkar, M. Levesque, P. Kölblinger, R. Dummer, V. Neel, B.C. Ozdemir, and G.P. Dotto. (2018). Androgen receptor functions as transcriptional repressor of Cancer Associated Fibroblast activation. J. Clin. Invest. 128(12): p. 5531-5548 doi: 10.1172/JCI99159.
Özdemir BC, Dotto GP. Sex Hormones and Anticancer Immunity. Clin Cancer Res. 2019 Aug 1;25(15):4603-4610. doi: 10.1158/1078-0432.CCR-19-0137. Epub 2019 Mar 19. PMID: 30890551. PMID: 30890551
Dotto, G.P. (2019) Gender and sex—time to bridge the gap, EMBO Molecular Medicine,DOI: 10.15252/emmm.201910668
Clocchiatti, A., Cora, E., Zhang, Y. and Dotto, G.P. Sexual dimorphism in cancer. Nature Reviews Cancer 2016; 16: p. 330-9 PMID: 27079803