Jonathan W. Simons, M.D.
Chief Executive Officer
Prostate Cancer Foundation
Santa Monica CA
Jonathan W. Simons, M.D., served as director of the Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University, since 2000 and recently joined hte Prostate Cancer Foundation. A highly acclaimed physician-scientist in translational cancer research, Dr. Simons is the first investigator to successfully use human gene therapy to create clinically measurable immune responses against metastatic prostate cancer.
Dr. Simons previously worked as director of the Molecular Pharmacology Program and Cancer Gene Therapy Laboratory at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where he was an associate professor of both Oncology and Urology. Dr. Simons is internationally recognized as a leader in the molecular oncology and gene therapy of prostate cancer.
A native of Washington, D.C., and raised in Ithaca, N.Y., Dr. Simons received his B.S. degree from Princeton University in 1980 and his M.D. degree from The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1984. Before entering medical school he was a Rotary International Postgraduate Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Kent, Canterbury, England, and a Nuffield Foundation Fellow in the Department of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge.
Dr. Simons completed his residency in internal medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, then began his career in cancer research as a Clinical Fellow in Medical Oncology and a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics at The Johns Hopkins Oncology Center. He conducted his three year post-doctoral fellowship under the mentorship of Dr. Bert Vogelstein, a leading figure in the field. In the last years of this program, he was asked to join the medical oncology staff and serve as an instructor in oncology at The Johns Hopkins Oncology Center. The following year, 1992, he was appointed to the Hopkins faculty as an Assistant Professor in both Oncology and Urology. He became an Associate Professor in both departments in 1997. He also holds a joint appointment as Visiting Professor of Genetic Medicine and Medical Oncology at the Free University Hospital and Cancer Center in Amsterdam.
Dr. Simons’ laboratory and the clinical group he led at Hopkins developed and conducted the first human gene therapy clinical trial for prostate cancer using prostate cancer vaccines and GM-CSF gene transfer. Based on the outpatient safety and promise of two early clinical trials translated from bench to bedside by Dr. Simons’ team, national clinical trials currently are testing the efficacy of these vaccines in men with advanced prostate cancer. The finding that human gene therapy concepts can be safely used to educate a patient’s immune system to recognize prostate cancer, and induce new, therapeutic, T-cell and antibody immune responses against chemotherapy refractory tumors like prostate cancer, recently has been viewed as paradigm shifting for solid tumor therapeutics.
More recently, Dr. Simons’ work on prostate cancer gene therapy has been translated from laboratory to a clinical trial of a new form of oncolytic gene therapy. This is the first target gene specific approach of its kind. It employs the use of a common cold virus (adenovirus) which has been genetically modified with a portion of the human PSA (prostate specific antigen) gene that makes it highly selective for viral killing of only prostate cancer cells. Over the past decade, Dr. Simons’ molecular pharmacology laboratory also is credited with first identifying two genes as new therapeutic targets to prostate cancer metastatic to bone (endothelin-1 receptor, H1F-1). Blockade of both targets is undergoing extensive drug development clinical trial testing in the U.S. pharmaceutical industry.
Dr. Simons is a founding member and leader of the Capcure Foundation Clinical Trials Consortium for prostate cancer. In addition to his work with The V Foundation, he has served in numerous leadership roles for the American Association of Cancer Research, American Society of Clinical Oncology, American Urological Association, National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health, Department of Defense Biomedical Research Initiatives for Cancer and the American Cancer Society. He and his postdoctoral fellows have received numerous research prizes.
