Bruce E. Johnson, MD

Bruce E. Johnson, MD, is an institute physician at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and a coleader of the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center Lung Cancer Program in Boston, MA. He is also a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and an American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Translational Research Professor. He received his undergraduate degree from Harvard University and his medical degree from the University of Minnesota, and he trained in internal medicine at the University of Chicago. Dr Johnson completed his medical oncology training at the National Cancer Institute, where he served as a faculty member from 1985 to 1998 and as head of their Lung Cancer Biology Section for 6 years. He came to Dana-Farber in 1998 to head the Lowe Center for Thoracic Oncology.

His research is devoted to testing novel therapeutic agents for their efficacy against lung cancer and other thoracic malignancies. He has published more than 270 research articles on a variety of topics, including the molecular basis of lung cancers and the development of targeted therapies for patients with specific genomic alterations in lung cancer. He is one of the investigators who discovered epidermal growth factor receptor mutations, which have enhanced the treatment of lung cancer throughout the world. He also led the studies that led to the US Food and Drug Administration approval of dabrafenib plus trametinib for BRAF-mutant non–small cell lung cancer. 

Dr Johnson served on the ASCO Board of Directors from 2008 to 2011, received the ASCO Cancer Foundation Translational Research Professorship in 2008, and was selected as an ASCO fellow in 2012. He was elected president of ASCO for the 2017-2018 term and served as immediate past president in 2018-2019.