Evan N Cohen, PhD
Department of Translational Molecular Pathology, Division of Pathology-Lab Medicine Div
Present Title & Affiliation
Primary Appointment
Assistant Professor, Department of Translational Molecular Pathology, Division of Pathology-Lab Medicine Div, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX
Dual/Joint/Adjunct Appointment
Assistant Professor, Department of Translational Molecular Path, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, Texas
Education & Training
Degree-Granting Education
| 2013 | The UT Grad Sch of Biomed Sci, Houston, Texas, US, Biomedical Science/Immunology, Ph.D |
Postgraduate Training
| 2018-2020 | Certificate, Health Data Science, The University of Texas Health Science Center Houston School of Biomedical Informatics, Houston, Texas |
| 2015-2018 | Research Fellowship, Immunology/Liquid Biopsy, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, Texas |
| 2013-2015 | Research Fellowship, Immunology, The University of Texas at Austin Cockrell School of Engineering, Austin, Texas |
Experience & Service
Faculty Academic Appointments
Assistant Professor, Department of Experimental Therapeutics, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX, 2023 - 2024
Instructor, Department of Hematopathology - Research, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX, 2018 - 2023
Institutional Committee Activities
Poster/Short Talk Judge, 2023 Leading Edge of Cancer Research Symposium, 2023
Abstract Judge, Summer Undergraduate Research Program, 2022 - 2022
Capital Equipment Procurement Assistant, Hematopathology Research Capital Equipment, 2019 - 2023
Honors & Awards
| 2018 | Neuosoft Certificate Scholarship, UT Health Science Center |
| 2011 | MD Anderson Faculty and Alumni Association Trainee Graduate Student Award in Clinical/Translation Research, UT M.D. Anderson Hospital Cancer Center |
| 2010 | MD Anderson Faculty and Alumni Association Trainee Graduate Student Award in Clinical/Translation Research, UT MD Anderson Hospital Cancer Center |
| 2008 - 2012 | Pre-doctoral Scholarship, Department of Defense |
Professional Memberships
Selected Presentations & Talks
National Presentations
- 2024. Temporal Dynamics of Bone Marrow Fibrocytes in the Progression of Primary Myelofibrosis. Poster. ASH. San Diego, CA, US.
- 2023. Activation with Plinabulin Enhances Anti-tumor Response Combining Radiation with Immune Checkpoint Blockade. Conference. Society for the Immunotherapy of Cancer. San Diego, CA, US.
- 2023. Glutaminase Inhibitors Block Metabolic Switch in Prostate Cancer and Prevents Anti-Androgen Treatment Resistance. Conference. AACR. Orlando, FL, US.
- 2022. A Multi-center Clinical Study to Harvest and Characterize Circulating Tumor Cells from Patients with Metastatic Breast Cancer Using the Parsortix® PC1 System in support of FDA clearance. Conference. AACR SABCS. San Antoio, TX, US.
- 2019. Peripheral T cell clonality and exhaustion as novel biomarkers for anti-PD-1 (pembrolizumab) maintenance therapy in patients with metastatic inflammatory breast cancer (mIBC) and non-IBC triple negative breast cancer (mTNBC). Conference. AACR. San Antonio, TX, US.
- 2019. STAT3-Induced Gli1 Promotes the Differentiation and Maturation of Myelofibrosis Fibrocytes. Conference. ASH. Orlando, FL, US.
International Presentations
- 2023. Biomarker analysis of phase II pembrolizumab maintenance treatment after chemotherapy response in patients with HER2-negative inflammatory breast cancer and triple-negative breast cancer. Conference. ASCO. Chicago, US.
- 2019. Immune Phenotypic Biomarkers in Locally Advanced Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer treated with Definitive Chemoradiation and Atezolizumab. Conference. IASLC. Barcelona, ES.
Grant & Contract Support
| Date: | 2023 - 2025 |
| Title: | R21 |
| Funding Source: | NIH/NCI |
| Role: | Co-I |
| Date: | 2022 - Present |
| Title: | Blood Analysis of BIG10 Consortium samples for Plinabulin clinical trial |
| Funding Source: | BIG Cancer Consortium |
| Role: | Co-I |
| Date: | 2020 - 2023 |
| Title: | Anti-Androgens Treatment Enhances Cytotoxicity of Oxidative-Phosphorylation Inhibitors Against Castration Resistant Prostate Cancer |
| Funding Source: | Department of Defense (DOD) |
| Role: | Co-I |
| ID: | FP00009196 |
| Title: | EPA-Dasatinib Combination Therapy for Metastatic Triple-Negative Inflammatory Breast Cancer |
| Funding Source: | NIH/NCI |
| Role: | Collaborator |
| Title: | Detection of Cardiotoxicity Related Circulating Endothelial Cells in Breast Cancer Patients |
| Funding Source: | NIH/NHLBI |
| Role: | Collaborator |
| Title: | A phase II study of combination of OBP-301 plus atezolizumab/nab-paclitaxel in patients with metastatic breast cancer |
| Funding Source: | Oncolys Biopharma |
| Role: | Collaborator |
| Title: | Immune modulation and anti-tumor effect of Ax-101 in combination with immune checkpoint inhibitor in breast cancer, melanoma, and colon cancer |
| Funding Source: | AxImmune |
| Role: | Co-PI |
| Title: | Strategic Alliance between MD Anderson Cancer Center and Hitachi Chemical Company to Evaluate a Microfludic System for the Isolation of Circulating Tumor Cells from Breast Cancer Patients |
| Funding Source: | Hitachi Chemical |
| Role: | Postdoctoral Fellow |
| Title: | Strategic Alliance between MD Anderson Cancer Center and Hitachi Chemical Company to Evaluate a Microfludic System for the Isolation of Circulating Tumor Cells from Lung Cancer Patients |
| Funding Source: | Hitachi Chemical |
| Role: | Postdoctoral Fellow |
| Title: | Harvest of Circulating Tumor Cells (CTCs) from Patients with Metastatic Breast Cancer (MBC) using the ParsortixTM PC1 System |
| Funding Source: | Angle, PLC |
| Role: | Postdoctoral Fellow |
| Title: | Biomarker discover study of DS-8201a, an anti-HER2-antibody drug conjugate, in randomized phase III trials in unresectable and/or metastatic breast cancer |
| Funding Source: | Daiichi Sankyo |
| Role: | Research Scientist |
| Title: | Preclinical concept to evaluate BTK degrader in combination with BCL-2 inhibitor in CLL |
| Funding Source: | AbbVie |
| Role: | Key |
| Title: | An Open-label, Single-center, Phase 1b/2 Study to Evaluate the Safety of Plinabulin in Combination with Radiation/Immunotherapy in Patients with Select Advanced Malignancies after progression on PD-1 or PD-L1 Targeted Antibodies |
| Funding Source: | BeyondSpring Pharmaceuticals |
| Role: | Co-I |
Selected Publications
Peer-Reviewed Articles
- Lin SH, Subbiah V, Cohen EN, Li Z, Lu YJ, Son YL, Lyu Y, Gao H, Jayachandran G, Neri S, Sharma A, Fang P, Karp D, Hong D, Rodon J, Yu H, Peng J, Lloyd GK, Tonra JR, Reuben JM, Huang L, Fu S. Plinabulin following radiation enhances dendritic cell maturation and checkpoint inhibitor retreatment of relapsed/refractory cancers. Med:100752, 2025. e-Pub 2025. PMID: 40580957.
- Iwase T, Parikh A, Wenli D, Shen Y, Adams DL, Tang CM, Cohen EN, Reuben JM, Shrimanker TV, Chainitikun S, Kida K, Raghavendra AS, Sapon ME, Sahin O, James A, Sridhar N, Klopp AH, Tripathy D, Ueno NT. Circulating cancer-associated macrophage-like cells and macrophage-related cytokines in obese patients with advanced breast cancer who undergo neoadjuvant chemotherapy. J Cancer 15(18):5855-5862, 2024. e-Pub 2024. PMID: 39440056.
- Iwase, T, Cohen, E, Gao, H, Alexander, A, Kai, M, Chiv, VY, Wang, X, Krishnamurthy, S, Liu, D, Shen, Y, Kida, K, Reuben, A, Layman, RM, Ramirez, DL, Tripathy, D, Moulder, S, Yam, C, Valero, V, Lim, B, Reuben, JM, Ueno, NT. Maintenance Pembrolizumab Therapy in Patients with Metastatic HER2-negative Breast Cancer with Prior Response to Chemotherapy. Clinical Cancer Research 30(11):2424-2432, 2024. e-Pub 2024. PMID: 38629963.
- Cohen EN, Jayachandran G, Gao H, Peabody P, McBride HB, Alvarez FD, Kai M, Song J, Shen Y, Willey JS, Lim B, Valero V, Ueno NT, Reuben JM. Phenotypic Plasticity in Circulating Tumor Cells Is Associated with Poor Response to Therapy in Metastatic Breast Cancer Patients. Cancers (Basel) 15(5), 2023. e-Pub 2023. PMID: 36900406.
- Cohen EN, Jayachandran G, Gao H, Peabody P, McBride HB, Alvarez FD, Bravo PL, Qiao W, Liu S, Yao L, Lin SH, Reuben JM. Gene expression profiling of circulating tumor cells captured by MicroCavity Array is superior to enumeration in demonstrating therapy response in patients with newly diagnosed advanced and locally advanced non-small cell lung cancer. Transl Lung Cancer Res 12(1):109-126, 2023. e-Pub 2023. PMID: 36762061.
- Wang X, Semba T, Manyam GC, Wang J, Shao S, Bertucci F, Finetti P, Krishnamurthy S, Phi LTH, Pearson T, Van Laere SJ, Burks JK, Cohen EN, Reuben JM, Yang F, Min H, Navin N, Trinh VN, Iwase T, Batra H, Shen Y, Zhang X, Tripathy D, Ueno NT. EGFR is a master switch between immunosuppressive and immunoactive tumor microenvironment in inflammatory breast cancer. Sci Adv 8(50):eabn7983, 2022. e-Pub 2022. PMID: 36525493.
- Cohen EN, Jayachandran G, Moore RG, Cristofanilli M, Lang JE, Khoury JD, Press MF, Kim KK, Khazan N, Zhang Q, Zhang Y, Kaur P, Guzman R, Miller MC, Reuben JM, Ueno NT. A Multi-Center Clinical Study to Harvest and Characterize Circulating Tumor Cells from Patients with Metastatic Breast Cancer Using the Parsortix® PC1 System. Cancers (Basel) 14(21), 2022. e-Pub 2022. PMID: 36358657.
- Wu LR, Dai P, Wang MX, Chen SX, Cohen EN, Jayachandran G, Zhang JX, Serrano AV, Xie NG, Ueno NT, Reuben JM, Barcenas CH, Zhang DY. Ensemble of nucleic acid absolute quantitation modules for copy number variation detection and RNA profiling. Nat Commun 13(1):1791, 2022. e-Pub 2022. PMID: 35379811.
- Cohen EN, Jayachandran G, Gao H, Qiao W, Liu S, He J, Qiao Y, Yao L, Lin SH, Reuben JM. Enumeration and molecular characterization of circulating tumor cells enriched by microcavity array from stage III non-small cell lung cancer patients. Transl Lung Cancer Res 9(5):1974-1985, 2020. e-Pub 2020. PMID: 33209617.
- Cohen EN, Jayachandran G, Hardy MR, Venkata Subramanian AM, Meng X, Reuben JM. Antigen-agnostic microfluidics-based circulating tumor cell enrichment and downstream molecular characterization. PLoS One 15(10):e0241123, 2020. e-Pub 2020. PMID: 33095819.
- Mego M, Gao H, Cohen EN, Anfossi S, Giordano A, Tin S, Fouad TM, De Giorgi U, Giuliano M, Woodward WA, Alvarez RH, Valero V, Ueno NT, Hortobagyi GN, Cristofanilli M, Reuben JM. Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) are associated with abnormalities in peripheral blood dendritic cells in patients with inflammatory breast cancer. Oncotarget 8(22):35656-35668, 2017. e-Pub 2017. PMID: 27374101.
- Mego M, Gao H, Cohen EN, Anfossi S, Giordano A, Sanda T, Fouad TM, De Giorgi U, Giuliano M, Woodward WA, Alvarez RH, Valero V, Ueno NT, Hortobagyi GN, Cristofanilli M, Reuben JM. Circulating Tumor Cells (CTC) Are Associated with Defects in Adaptive Immunity in Patients with Inflammatory Breast Cancer. J Cancer 7(9):1095-104, 2016. e-Pub 2016. PMID: 27326253.
- Cohen EN, Gao H, Anfossi S, Mego M, Reddy NG, Debeb B, Giordano A, Tin S, Wu Q, Garza RJ, Cristofanilli M, Mani SA, Croix DA, Ueno NT, Woodward WA, Luthra R, Krishnamurthy S, Reuben JM. Inflammation Mediated Metastasis: Immune Induced Epithelial-To-Mesenchymal Transition in Inflammatory Breast Cancer Cells. PLoS One 10(7):e0132710, 2015. e-Pub 2015. PMID: 26207636.
- Giuliano M, Giordano A, Jackson S, De Giorgi U, Mego M, Cohen EN, Gao H, Anfossi S, Handy BC, Ueno NT, Alvarez RH, De Placido S, Valero V, Hortobagyi GN, Reuben JM, Cristofanilli M. Circulating tumor cells as early predictors of metastatic spread in breast cancer patients with limited metastatic dissemination. Breast Cancer Res 16(5):440, 2014. e-Pub 2014. PMID: 25223629.
- Wang XS, Shi Q, Shah ND, Heijnen CJ, Cohen EN, Reuben JM, Orlowski RZ, Qazilbash MH, Johnson VE, Williams LA, Mendoza TR, Cleeland CS. Inflammatory markers and development of symptom burden in patients with multiple myeloma during autologous stem cell transplantation. Clin Cancer Res 20(5):1366-74, 2014. e-Pub 2014. PMID: 24423611.
- Anfossi S, Giordano A, Gao H, Cohen EN, Tin S, Wu Q, Garza RJ, Debeb BG, Alvarez RH, Valero V, Hortobagyi GN, Calin GA, Ueno NT, Woodward WA, Reuben JM. High serum miR-19a levels are associated with inflammatory breast cancer and are predictive of favorable clinical outcome in patients with metastatic HER2+ inflammatory breast cancer. PLoS One 9(1):e83113, 2014. e-Pub 2014. PMID: 24416156.
- Mego M, Gao H, Lee BN, Cohen EN, Tin S, Giordano A, Wu Q, Liu P, Nieto Y, Champlin RE, Hortobagyi GN, Cristofanilli M, Ueno NT, Reuben JM. Prognostic Value of EMT-Circulating Tumor Cells in Metastatic Breast Cancer Patients Undergoing High-Dose Chemotherapy with Autologous Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplantation. J Cancer 3:369-80, 2012. e-Pub 2012. PMID: 23074378.
- Naing A, Reuben JM, Camacho LH, Gao H, Lee BN, Cohen EN, Verschraegen C, Stephen S, Aaron J, Hong D, Wheler J, Kurzrock R. Phase I Dose Escalation Study of Sodium Stibogluconate (SSG), a Protein Tyrosine Phosphatase Inhibitor, Combined with Interferon Alpha for Patients with Solid Tumors. J Cancer 2:81-9, 2011. e-Pub 2011. PMID: 21326629.
- Krishnamurthy S, Cristofanilli M, Singh B, Reuben J, Gao H, Cohen EN, Andreopoulou E, Hall CS, Lodhi A, Jackson S, Lucci A. Detection of minimal residual disease in blood and bone marrow in early stage breast cancer. Cancer 116(14):3330-7, 2010. e-Pub 2010. PMID: 20564098.
- Debeb BG, Zhang X, Krishnamurthy S, Gao H, Cohen E, Li L, Rodriguez AA, Landis MD, Lucci A, Ueno NT, Robertson F, Xu W, Lacerda L, Buchholz TA, Cristofanilli M, Reuben JM, Lewis MT, Woodward WA. Characterizing cancer cells with cancer stem cell-like features in 293T human embryonic kidney cells. Mol Cancer 9:180, 2010. e-Pub 2010. PMID: 20615238.
- Jain N, Reuben JM, Kantarjian H, Li C, Gao H, Lee BN, Cohen EN, Ebarb T, Scheinberg DA, Cortes J. Synthetic tumor-specific breakpoint peptide vaccine in patients with chronic myeloid leukemia and minimal residual disease: a phase 2 trial. Cancer 115(17):3924-34, 2009. e-Pub 2009. PMID: 19536894.
- Lagow RD, Bao H, Cohen EN, Daniels RW, Zuzek A, Williams WH, Macleod GT, Sutton RB, Zhang B. Modification of a hydrophobic layer by a point mutation in syntaxin 1A regulates the rate of synaptic vesicle fusion. PLoS Biol 5(4):e72, 2007. e-Pub 2007. PMID: 17341138.
- Reuben JM, Lee BN, Li C, Gomez-Navarro J, Bozon VA, Parker CA, Hernandez IM, Gutierrez C, Lopez-Berestein G, Camacho LH. Biologic and immunomodulatory events after CTLA-4 blockade with ticilimumab in patients with advanced malignant melanoma. Cancer 106(11):2437-44, 2006. e-Pub 2006. PMID: 16615096.
Patient Reviews
CV information above last modified July 24, 2025