Nicolaos Palaskas, MD, PhD

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Dr Palaskas joined the Encino Cancer Care practice in 2017 and is excited to help fulfill the mission of UCLA in bringing access to clinical trials and academic-center level care to the Encino community. He is a Clinical Instructor of Medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and clinician-investigator. He completed his Hematology/Oncology fellowship at UCLA and is a graduate of the Specialty Training and Advanced Research Program. Dr Palaskas is a native of the American Midwest but spent many years in Europe, including attending medical school in Thessaloniki, Greece. He trained in Internal Medicine at St Elizabeth s Medical Center in Boston, a TUFTS University affiliate. Prior to his Fellowship at UCLA, he cared for complicated cancer patients with multiple medical problems at a Partners Healthcare Long Term Acute Care facility in Cambridge MA. As a member of the Ingo Mellinghoff lab at UCLA and later at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, he contributed to preclinical research into mechanisms of tumor resistance to targeted therapies, new metabolic inhibitors targeting a mutated version of the enzyme IDH, and treatment targets for lymphomas of the brain. An IDH inhibitor is now approved by the FDA for the treatment of relapsed and refractory acute myeloid leukemias. Pulse-dose lapatinib is currently being tested in a phase II clinical trial sponsored by the Jonson Comprehensive Cancer Center at UCLA in patients with an aggressive form of brain tumors and expected to be completed in 2019. The substantial activity of Ibrutinib in a phase I trial in relapsed and refractory brain lymphomas was reported in Cancer Discovery. Dr Palaskas is now interested in using metabolic interventions to improve the already promising activity of cancer immunotherapies.