Dr. Anirban Maitra is an Assistant Proffesor in the Division of Gastrointestinal/Liver Pathology at Johns Hopkins, with secondary appointments in Oncology and Genetic Medicine. He completed his residency training in Anatomic Pathology from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and a fellowship in Gastrointestinal/Liver Pathology from Johns Hopkins University. During his residency and fellowship training, Dr. Maitra worked extensively on identifying biomarkers for early diagnosis of cancer, and studied the molecular pathology of preneoplastic lesions (i.e., changes that precede cancer).

Since his arrival at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Maitra has been involved in identifying molecular targets in pancreatic and biliary tract cancers, particularly those that can be a substrate for therapy. Unlike commonly used cytotoxic agents, "mechanism-based" strategies utilize specific biochemical differences between cancer and normal cells and thus, the effects of chemotherapy are selectively detrimental to cancer cells only. For example, a compound may be lethal to cancer cells that have deleted both copies of a particular gene, while normal cells can "bypass" the effects of this drug by retaining one or both copies of the implicated gene. Another broad class of "mechanism-based" therapies that is being pursued in Dr. Maitra's laboratory involve small molecule inhibitors of developmental signaling pathways. These pathways (for example, Notch and Hedegehog) are active during embryonic development but are quiescent in most adult somatic cells. Considerable evidence has now accrued that demonstrates the aberrant re-activation of these developmental signaling pathways in human cancers, including the majority of pancreatic and biliary malignancies. Targeting these pathways with specific small molecules provides a powerful avenue for therapy, while potential circumventing toxicities associated with conventional antimetabolite compounds. Dr. Maitra has generated a large series of low-passage biliary cancer xenografts from resected bile duct and gallbladder cancers at Hopkins, and these are being used for many of the therapeutic studies. In collaboration with researchers in countries with a very high incidence of gallbladder cancer (e.g., Chile), Dr. Maitra has also been studying the multistep progression model of these uncommon but lethal neoplasms.