Eric Haura, MD

Dr. Haura is a Thoracic Medical Oncologist with a laboratory-based research program in signal transduction, cancer proteomics, and experimental therapeutics. He received his B. S. in biomedical engineering from the Johns Hopkins University in 1990 and his M.D. from Duke University in 1994. He completed internal medicine residency at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1997, and completed fellowship training in Hematology & Oncology at Duke in 2000. In 2009 he was named the Program Leader in Experimental Therapeutics, one of the five key research programs of the Moffitt Cancer Center Support Grant (CCSG). In 2012 this program was renamed the Molecular Medicine Program. As a co-leader of this large program (~55 members), he led the efforts for renewal of our CCSG grant in 2011 and 2016. In 2010, he was named the Director of the Moffitt Lung Cancer Center of Excellence (COE). The Lung Cancer COE supports trans-disciplinary research towards the prevention and cure of lung cancer. This center focuses on team science endeavors and organizes groups focusing on basic, population, and clinical research surrounding the lung cancer problem. In 2020, Dr. Haura was appointed to Associate Center Director for Clinical Science at Moffitt. Dr. Haura was named the ASCO Advanced Clinical Research Award in 2007, Moffitt Research Mentor of the Year in 2009, and Moffitt Research Scientist of the Year in 2011. In 2014 he was inducted into the American Society of Clinical Investigation (ASCI), one of the nation's oldest and most respected honor societies for physician-scientists.

His career is focused on translational research in the area of lung cancer and other solid tumors. His group has made major contributions towards elucidating cancer signaling pathways by applying mass spectrometry based proteomic approaches to studying kinase signaling pathways. He has developed approaches to discern mechanisms of complex drugs in cancer combining chemical and phosphoproteomics approaches and have described kinase function through combined RNA interference and global mass spectrometry based proteomics. Importantly, clinical trials originated from this initial approach characterizing system level effects of two tyrosine kinase inhibitors. His group continues to innovate by deploying early technology related to mass spectrometry including the development of a diverse toolbox to study lung cancer and signaling networks. This includes chemical proteomics to elucidate drug targets, phosphoproteomics to characterize pathway level changes downstream of kinases, and discerning alterations in protein-protein interactions driven by mutant oncoproteins. His group has also heavily invested in in situ approaches to study protein complexes related to receptor tyrosine kinases. To bring my research to the next level, he spent six months during a sabbatical in 2009 studying proteomics first hand in the laboratory of Giulio Superti-Furga in Vienna, Austria.

He has been supported by various NCI grants (R01, SPORE, RC1, UH2-UH3, U01 and R21) in addition to support through State of Florida grants and various private foundations. He possesses a track record of building successful industry collaborations to support areas within my laboratory. He has published nearly 200 papers in top tier scientific journals including Science Signaling, Nature Communication, Nature Chemical Biology, PNAS, Molecular Systems Biology, Journal of Clinical Oncology, Clinical Cancer Research, and Cancer Research.

In addition to his laboratory investigation he is an active clinician spending one day per week caring for patients in the Department of Thoracic Oncology. He is an expert in the care of patients with all type of thoracic malignancies but focuses on the management of advanced lung cancer. He has a track record related to clinical investigations and translation of his own research into clinical trials, having designed, executed, and published investigator-initiated trials of novel agents for human trials (including both phase I and phase II trials). He has also nurtured teams within Moffitt to translate and implement their work originating from laboratory observations into clinical trials testing new therapies, and partnered to develop genomic and other biomarker testing platforms used for clinical care and research.