Tim Yap, MD, PhD is a Medical Oncology Physician-Scientist and a Tenure-Track Associate Professor in the Departments of Investigational Cancer Therapeutics (Phase I Program), and Thoracic/Head and Neck Medical Oncology at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center (MDACC). He is also the Medical Director of the Institute for Applied Cancer Science, and Associate Director of Translational Research in the Institute for Personalized Cancer Therapy at MDACC.

Dr. Yap joined the Faculty at MDACC in 2016 from the Royal Marsden Hospital and The Institute of Cancer Research (London, England), where he was a National Institute for Health Research Biomedical Research Centre Clinician-Scientist in Medical Oncology. He was on the Faculty of the Phase I Drug Development Unit and Lung Cancer Unit, where he also led the Cancer Biomarkers Laboratory involved with the development of cfDNA and CTCs.

Dr. Yap’s main interests include the design and conduct of hypothesis-testing, biomarker-driven clinical trials ranging from first-in-human phase I studies to phase II tumor-agnostic multi-genotype basket trials, which incorporate detailed tumor molecular profiling studies, as well as the assessment of circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) as predictive biomarkers of response for novel targeted agents and immunotherapies in clinical trials. His main therapeutic interests include the targeting of the DNA damage response (DDR) with novel therapeutics, such as ATR, PARP and DNA-PK inhibitors, as well as the development of novel PD-1/PD-L1 combinations with agents targeting ICOS, TGF-beta, PI3K/AKT, TIM-3, STING, Adenosine A2AR, LAG-3 and CDK2/4/6.