David Ting's Biography

David Ting, Assistant Professor Of Medicine, Harvard Medical School

David Ting, M.D. is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a physician scientist at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Cancer Center. Dr. Ting received his B.S. in chemical engineering and biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1999. He then went on to complete his medical degree in 2004 at Harvard Medical School in the Health Science and Technology (HST) program. During his medical training, he did biomedical research with Dr. Robert Langer at MIT working on polymer based nucleic acid delivery systems, and also completed a Howard Hughes Medical Institute fellowship with Dr. George Daley at the Whitehead Institute working on the differentiation of embryonic stem cells into hematopoietic stem cells. He did his residency in internal medicine at MGH followed by medical oncology fellowship in the combined Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and MGH Cancer Center program.
In 2008, he began his post-doctoral research work with Daniel Haber’s group at the MGH Cancer Center, where he began work characterizing pancreatic circulating tumor cells (CTCs) and primary tumors with RNA-sequencing. This led to his discovery of aberrant satellite non-coding RNA expression across epithelial cancers, the identification of Wnt pathway activation in pancreatic CTCs, and the characterization of pancreatic CTC heterogeneity through single cell RNA-sequencing. His laboratory utilizes single cell RNA-sequencing, CTC microfluidic technologies, and RNA in situ hybridization methodology to understand the complex transcriptional landscape of pancreatic cancer. This has provided novel insight into the pathogenesis of pancreatic cancer and novel cancer biomarkers and therapeutic targets.