Dr. Javier F. Torres-Roca, M.D., a board certified radiation oncologist, is a Senior Member at the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute in the Department of Radiation Oncology, the Chemical Biology & Molecular Medicine Program, and the Department of Biomedical Informatics, and is a Professor of Oncologic Sciences at the University of South Florida, College of Medicine, in Tampa, Florida. Dr. Torres-Roca earned his medical degree from the University of Puerto Rico and subsequently performed post-doctoral training in immunology and molecular biology in the laboratories of Nobel Laureate Professor Luc Montagnier at the Institut Pasteur and Dr. Irving Weismann and Dr. Leonard Herzenberg at Stanford University. Dr. Torres-Roca completed his clinical training in radiation oncology at the University of California. Since 2002 Dr. Torres-Roca has been clinical faculty at Moffitt Cancer Center with a sub-specialty in urological and cutaneous malignancies. He is also the founder of Cvergenx, Inc, a genomics informatics company that is commercializing the first clinical approach to precision medicine in radiation oncology.
The central interest of Dr. Torres‐Roca’s laboratory is in the development of a systems level understanding of the biological networks that regulate radiosensitivity and the translation of this knowledge into biology-based personalized approaches for patients receiving radiation therapy. We aim to move the field of radiation oncology from the empiric-based one-size fits all approach that is standard today to one that is biology-based and personalized. This strategy has resulted in the development of the gene-expression based radiosensitivity index (RSI), a molecular signature of tumor radiosensitivity that has been independently validated in multiple disease sites, independent clinical cohorts in over 2,000 patients and the genomic-adjusted radiation dose (GARD), a metric of the biologic effect of RT which provides the first opportunity to quantify the therapeutic benefit of RT for each individual patient.