Michael Savona, MD

Michael Savona, MD, is the Beverly and George Rawlings Director of Hematology Research and professor of internal medicine and cancer biology at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. He obtained his bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Davidson College and his medical degree from Wake Forest University School of Medicine. He did post-graduate clinical and research training at the University of California and the University of Michigan. He also served as a physician in the United States Air Force and is a veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom/Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Dr Savona is a clinician-physician-scientist specializing in myeloid malignancies and a leader in the development of novel therapies for these patients. He has led the development and approval of several novel therapies for myeloid neoplasms, holding several Investigational New Drugs and serving as lead investigator for New Drug Applications to the US Food and Drug Administration. He founded the MDS/MPN International Working Group in 2012, and he leads the first international platform study of novel therapies in myelodysplastic syndrome/myeloproliferative overlap syndromes: ABNL-MARRO.

In his translational efforts from the laboratory, he is interested in developing new therapies for hematologic malignancies. He has focused his studies on mitochondrial metabolism in myeloid malignancies and has developed an early inhibitor to MCL1 to battle BCL2 resistance. More recently, he has studied clonal hematopoiesis (CH), with specific interest in the progression of CH to myeloid neoplasia and/or to vascular disease. He is the founder of Clonal Hematopoiesis and Inflammation in the VasculaturE (CHIVE), which is one of the first and largest prospective repositories and registries of patients with CH. 

Dr Savona has been involved in biomedical research for more than 20 years, and he has published in major academic journals that include Cancer Discovery, The Journal of Clinical Oncology, Nature Medicine, Nature Cancer, Nature Reviews, Blood, Cell Stem Cell, The Lancet, The Lancet Oncology, The Lancet Haematology, and The Journal of the American Medical Association. 

He is an elected fellow of the American College of Physicians and is a Leukemia & Lymphoma Society clinical scholar.