Dr. Anthony Letai, M.D., Ph.D.,joined NCI as the 18th director on September 29, 2025. He previously served as professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and medical oncologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

Dr. Letai is a physician–scientist whose work has helped transform cancer treatment and advance functional precision medicine. He is the recipient of the Sidney Kimmel Foundation Scholar Award, theLeukemia and Lymphoma Society Scholar Award, the European Cell Death Organization Career Award, the Smith Family Prize for Outstanding Scientific Contributions, and the NCI Outstanding Investigator Award. He also serves as an elected member of theAmerican Society of Clinical Investigation and Association of American Physicians. In 2019, the Web of Science Group named Dr. Letai in its list ofHighly Cited Researchers, whose papers rank in the top 1% by citations for their field and year of publication, showing his significant impact on his area of research.

An advocate for research that can quickly bring new, effective treatments to patients, Dr. Letai served as co-founder and President of theSociety for Functional Precision Medicine, which works to improve patient care and outcomes by supporting the use of functional assays in clinical care.

Dr. Letai’s career has focused on researching and treating hematological malignancies. His pioneering work in functional precision oncology helped advance therapies such as BCL-2 inhibitors—drugs that are now standard treatment for many adults with leukemia. In addition, his team developed a technique, called BH3 profiling, that helps predict how cancer cells will respond to chemotherapies. BH3 profiling is now being tested to discover how it can be used in clinical practice to find the right drugs for the right patients. Other recent research has looked at how harnessing cell death signaling can improve the effectiveness of current immunotherapies.

Dr. Letai received his Bachelor of Arts degree in physics from Princeton University. After receiving his M.D. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago with Elaine Fuchs, Ph.D., Dr. Letai completed his residency in internal medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and a fellowship in hematology and oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. His interest in cancer cell death evolved during his post-doctoral research training at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in the laboratory of Dr. Stanley Korsmeyer.