Brian Van Tine, MD, PhD

Brian Van Tine, MD, PhD, is a professor of medicine and pediatrics at Washington University. He is the Sarcoma Program Director, Director of the Phase 1 Program, and Co-Director of the Adolescence and Young Adult Program at the Alvin J. Siteman Cancer Center. Van Tine received his bachelor of science degree from the University of Arizona in 1995.  Van Tine completed his MD and doctoral degrees at the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 2005. His PhD thesis research mainly focused on the role of Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) in the development of cervical cancer, working with Professors Louis Chow and Thomas Broker. Dr. Van Tine subsequently came to Washington University in St. Louis/Barnes-Jewish Hospital, where he completed an internal medicine residency and a medical oncology fellowship. He joined the laboratory of James J.D. Hsieh, MD, PhD, and, later, the lab of Matthew Ellis, MB, B.Chir, PhD, where he pursued his postdoctoral fellowship studying mouse genetics and genomics while clinically specializing in the treatment of sarcoma.

Van Tine’s translational laboratory identified a common defect in sarcoma, the loss of ASS1 expression. His group is currently working toward translating this finding to the clinic via clinical trials. They were the first to report that argininosuccinate synthetase 1 is silenced in ~90% of sarcomas, which renders them susceptible to arginine deprivation therapy and glutaminase inhibitors because they cannot synthesize arginine. He has demonstrated that arginine starvation overcomes gemcitabine resistance in sarcoma, a concept being formally tested in a phase II prospective clinical trial. Finally, the laboratory was the first to identify the loss of malic enzyme 1 (ME1) in synovial sarcoma, a finding that has direct therapeutic consequences, as well as PHGDH dependency in osteosarcoma.