Brian Van Tine, MD PhD

Brian Andrew Van Tine, M.D., Ph.D. is a Professor of Medicine in the Department of Medicine and Professor of Pediatrics at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. He is the Sarcoma Program Director, Director of the Phase 1 Program at Alvin J. Siteman Cancer Center and Co-Director of the Adolescence and Young Adult Program at the Alvin J. Siteman Cancer Center. Dr. Van Tine received his Bachelors of Science degree from the Departments of Chemistry and Biochemistry at The University of Arizona in 1995. Dr. Van Tine completed his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees at the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 2005. His thesis research mainly focused on the role of Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) in the development of cervical cancer with Profs. Louis T. Chow and Thomas R. Broker. After completing his M.D., Ph.D., Dr. Van Tine came to Washington University in St. Louis/Barnes Jewish Hospital where he did his Internal Medicine Residency and Medical Oncology Fellowship. He joined the laboratories of James J.D. Hsieh, M.D., Ph.D. and then Matthew Ellis, M.B., B.Chir., Ph.D., where he pursued his postdoctoral fellowship studying mouse genetics and genomics while clinically specializing in the treatment of sarcoma. His translational laboratory identified a common defect in sarcoma, the loss of ASS1 expression. His lab is currently working toward translating this finding to the clinic via clinical trials. They were the first to report that argininosuccinate synthetase 1 is silenced in ~90% of sarcomas, which renders them susceptible to arginine deprivation therapy and glutaminase inhibitors because they cannot synthesize arginine. He has demonstrated that arginine starvation overcomes gemcitabine resistance in sarcoma, a concept being formally tested in a phase II prospective clinical trial. Finally, the laboratory was the first to identify the loss of malic enzyme 1 (ME1) in synovial sarcoma, a finding that has direct therapeutic consequences, as well as PHGDH dependency in osteosarcoma.