Christopher S. Hourigan DM DPhil FRCP is Director of the Virginia Tech FBRI Cancer Research Center in Washington, D.C.
He was previously Chief of the Laboratory of Myeloid Malignancies and a tenured Senior Investigator in the intramural research program of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. He was also a faculty member on the Leukemia service of Johns Hopkins Hospital.
Professor Hourigan focuses on a clinical and translation research in precision oncology with a central focus on “measurable residual disease” (MRD) in patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML). Discoveries include the demonstration that early intervention for patients with AML in clinical remission but with evidence of detectable “subclinical” disease could improve survival after allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation (alloHCT), and that pre-transplant blood testing using DNA-sequencing could identify adults at the highest risk of post-transplant relapse and death from the most common forms of AML. Dr. Hourigan leads the nationwide prospective clinical protocol (“MEASURE”, NCT05224661) to validate and implement AML MRD testing during alloHCT, serves as co-director of the trans-NIH Myeloid Malignancies Program, co-chair of the genomic MRD section of the European LeukemiaNet AML MRD guidelines, and as co-PI of the FNIH AML MRD biomarkers consortium.
Dr. Hourigan received his doctorate from Oxford University for work performed in the laboratory of Sir John Bell. He completed medical school at Oxford University, followed by postdoctoral clinical training at Guy's and St Thomas' Hospitals in London, and internal medicine residency and medical oncology fellowship training at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore. Dr. Hourigan was elected to the Johns Hopkins chapter of Alpha Omega Alpha and as an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians (London). In 2019 he received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in recognition of his work on AML MRD.
