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David E. Avigan, MD

    Chief, Division of Hematology and Hematologic Malignancies
    Director, Cancer Center
    Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
    Senior Vice President, Cancer Services
    Beth Israel Lahey Health
    Professor of Medicine
    Harvard Medical School
    Boston, MA

David E. Avigan, MD, joined the attending staff of hematology/oncology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) in 1996 and became chief of the Hematological Malignancies and Bone Marrow Transplant Section in 2014, chief of the Hematology and Hematologic Malignancies Division in 2019, and senior vice president of Cancer Services at Beth Israel Lahey Health and director of the Cancer Center at BIDMC in 2022. He is also a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.


Dr Avigan received his undergraduate degree from Columbia University and completed his MD at Yale School of Medicine. He did his internal medicine and residency training at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, where he was chief resident of internal medicine. He was a fellow and, later, chief fellow in hematology/oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, as well as a research fellow at The Rockefeller University.


He has established a translational research program for cancer vaccines at BIDMC as part of the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center. Laboratory efforts have focused on the development of dendritic cell–based vaccines, including a model in which patient-derived tumor cells are fused with dendritic cells as a novel patient-specific vaccine. Based on these findings, Dr Avigan has supervised a series of clinical trials to examine the immunologic and clinical efficacy of this vaccine strategy for patients with hematologic malignancies and solid tumors. His work has been supported by grants from the National Cancer Institute, the National Institutes of Health, the US Department of Defense, the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, and the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation.


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