Theodoros Karantanos MD, PhD
Instructor of Oncology, Division of Hematologic Malignancies, Department of Medical Oncology, The Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MarylandTheodoros Karantanos, MD, PhD, is an Instructor of Medical Oncology at Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center/Johns Hopkins University at the Division of Hematologic Malignancies whose work focuses on the molecular basis of growth-related pathways in myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) and secondary acute myeloid leukemia (sAML).
Dr. Karantanos graduated from the School of Health Sciences at the University of Athens, Greece, and received a PhD in cancer biology. As a post-doctoral research fellow at MD Anderson Cancer Center/University of Texas, he studied signal transduction in cancer and developed expertise in mouse modeling and targeted therapies.
Dr. Karantanos completed his internal medicine residency and chief residency at Boston University and his oncology fellowship at Johns Hopkins. He became interested in sex-related differences in myeloid neoplasms demonstrating that men with MPN and MDS/MPN have worse outcomes and more complex genomic profile. To shed light into these clinical observations, he worked as a research fellow under the mentorship of Dr. Richard Jones, studying malignant hematopoiesis. Dr. Karantanos' studies led to the identification of CCRL2, an androgen receptor-regulated gene encoding an atypical chemokine receptor as an inducer of MDS/sAML cells growth and a mediator of azacitidine resistance.
Dr. Karantanos' current research focuses on the elucidation of growth-related pathways in MDS/sAML and discovery of novel therapies to suppress them utilizing CRISPR-Cas9 technology, proteomics analysis, high-throughput drug screens, analysis of primary samples and xenograft models.