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Devin C. Dressman, PhD

Assistant Professor of Pathology, University of Pittsburgh, Associate Director for Research Operations & Strategy, UPMC Hillman Cancer Center

Dr. Dressman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pathology. He is also the Associate Director for research operations and strategy at the UPMC Hillman Cancer Center. His primary role at UPMC Hillman is leading and managing the cancer center’s shared resources. He oversees all 10 of UPMC Hillman’s shared resources and oversees all the cancer center’s research facilities. He also develops and promotes external partnerships to benefit and enhance UPMC Hillman-driven cancer research and represents UPMC Hillman on such initiatives. Additionally, he has been heavily involved in team science activities and helped the cancer center to grow from having one National Cancer Institute (NCI) funded Specialized Programs of Research Excellence (SPORE) to having three active SPORE grants. Additionally, he has been involved in many of UPMC Hillman’s successful National Institutes Health training and instrumentation grants, such as T32 and S10 grants.

Education & Training
PhD – University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, 2002
Postdoctoral Fellowship – Johns Hopkins Medical Institute, 2010
Awards
1997 – Phi Kappa Phi Honor Fraternity, Lifetime member award
2003-2010 – Howard Hughes Medical Institute Postdoctoral Fellow
2016 – Most Notable Contribution to IP - Life Sciences Group (LSG) Thermo Fisher Scientific
Research Interests

Early in his scientific career, Dr. Dressman contributed to the field of basic and translational research in the muscular dystrophies as well as gene therapy and delivery. He was instrumental in the initial work involving gene delivery to the muscular dystrophies, specifically the work using adeno-associated viral (AAV) delivery for the sarcoglycanopathies. This work laid some of the foundations for the current commercial therapies in Spinal Muscular Atrophies (SMA). It also led to several publications and abstracts as well as a plenary presentation at the American Society for Human Genetics.

Dr. Dressman switched his focus to cancer genetics during his post-doctoral fellowship and was heavily involved in technology development for cancer diagnostics and methodologies for next-generation sequencing. His original work in cancer diagnostics helped foster the rapid expansion in the field of liquid biopsies with his invention of emulsion PCR. He has continued in technology development in the next-generation field leading to numerus patents, as well as new developments in the liquid-biopsy and immuno-oncology space. 

Dr. Dressman’s research efforts at the University of Pittsburgh have been influenced by his past, as he has been involved with work in cell and gene therapy, working closely with the cell therapy group at UPMC Hillman Cancer Center. Dr. Dressman’s research interests are primarily focused on cancer diagnostics, and he is currently working on a grant that helps identify novel biomarkers for responses to immunotherapy. Additionally, with an interest in technology development and diagnostics, he has been focused on spatial-omics research and has been attempting to identify novel biomarkers for both therapeutic and diagnostic indications. He is currently the lead PI on an industry sponsored research grant for a large spatial-omics project working to map out 10,000 samples with spatial transcriptomics, whole exome, whole transcriptome, and single cell sequencing data.

Representative Publications
  1. Kato S, Okamura R, Kumaki Y, Ikeda S, Mikanjam M, Eskander R, Goodman A, Lee S, Glenn ST, Dressman D, Papanicolau-Sengos A. Expression of TIM3/VISTA checkpoints and the CD68 macrophage-associated marker correlates with anti-PD1/PDL1 resistance: implications of immunogram heterogeneity. Oncoimmuno. 2020; 9(1):1708065. PMCID: PMC7028323
  2. Morrison C, Pabla S, Conroy JM, Nesline MK, Glenn ST, Dressman D, Papanicolau-Sengos A, Burgher B, Andreas J, Giamo V, Qin M, Wang Y, Lenzo FL, Omilian A, Bshara W, Zibelman M, Ghatalia P, Dragnev K, Shirai K, Madden KG, Tafe LJ, Shah N, Kasuganti D, de la Cruz-Merino L, Araujo I, Saenger Y, Bogardus M, Villalona-Calero M, Diaz Z, Day R, Eisenberg M, Anderson SM, Puzanov I, Galluzzi L, Gardner M, Ernstoff MS. Predicting response to checkpoint inhibitors in melanoma beyond PD-L1 and mutational burden. J Immunotherapy Cancer. 2018;6(1):32. PMCID: PMC5944039.
  3. Merriman B, Rothberg JM. Progress in ion torrent semiconductor chip based sequencing. Electrophoresis. 2012;33(23):3397-417. PMID: 23208921.
  4. Rothberg JM, Hinz W, Rearick TM, Schultz J, Mileski W, Davey M, Leamon JH, Johnson K, Milgrew MJ, Edwards M, Hoon J, Simons JF, Marran D, Myers JW, Davidson JF, Branting A, Nobile JR, Puc BP, Light D, Clark TA, Huber M, Branciforte JT, Stoner IB, Cawley SE, Lyons M, Fu Y, Homer N, Sedova M, Miao X, Reed B, Sabina J, Feierstein E, Schorn M, Alanjary M, Dimalanta E, Dressman D, Kasinskas R, Sokolsky T, Fidanza JA, Namsaraev E, McKernan KJ, Williams A, Roth GT, Bustillo J. An integrated semiconductor device enabling non-optical genome sequencing. Nature. 2011;475(7356):348-52. PMID: 21776081.
  5. He Y, Wu J, Dressman DC, Iacobuzio-Donahue C, Markowitz SD, Velculescu VE, Diaz LA, Jr., Kinzler KW, Vogelstein B, Papadopoulos N. Heteroplasmic mitochondrial DNA mutations in normal and tumour cells. Nature. 2010;464(7288):610-4. Epub 2010/03/05. doi: 10.1038/nature08802. PubMed PMID: 20200521; PMCID: PMC3176451.
  6. Dressman D, Ahearn ME, Yariz KO, Basterrecha H, Martinez F, Palau F, Barmada MM, Clark RD, Meindl A, Wirth B, Hoffman EP, Baumbach-Reardon L. X-linked infantile spinal muscular atrophy: clinical definition and molecular mapping. Genet Med. 2007;9(1):52-60. PMID: 17224690.
  7. Li M, Diehl F, Dressman D, Vogelstein B, Kinzler KW. BEAMing up for detection and quantification of rare sequence variants. Nat Methods. 2006;3(2):95-7. PMID: 16432518.
  8. Diehl F, Li M, He Y, Kinzler KW, Vogelstein B, Dressman D. BEAMing: single-molecule PCR on microparticles in water-in-oil emulsions. Nat Methods. 2006;3(7):551-9. PMID: 16791214.
  9. Diehl F, Li M, Dressman D, He Y, Shen D, Szabo S, Diaz LA, Jr., Goodman SN, David KA, Juhl H, Kinzler KW, Vogelstein B. Detection and quantification of mutations in the plasma of patients with colorectal tumors. Pro Natl Acad  Sci  U S A. 2005;102(45):16368-73. PMCID: PMC1283450.
  10. Khatua S, Peterson KM, Brown KM, Lawlor C, Santi MR, LaFleur B, Dressman D, Stephan DA, MacDonald TJ. Overexpression of the EGFR/FKBP12/HIF-2alpha pathway identified in childhood astrocytomas by angiogenesis gene profiling. Cancer Res. 2003;63(8):1865-70. PMID: 12702575.
  11. Dressman D, Yan H, Traverso G, Kinzler KW, Vogelstein B. Transforming single DNA molecules into fluorescent magnetic particles for detection and enumeration of genetic variations. Pro Natl Acad  Sci  U S A. 2003;100(15):8817-22. PMCID: PMC166396.