Dr. Tyner is a co-director of the Translational Oncology Program for the Knight Cancer Institute, director of the Cancer Biology Graduate Program, and a professor in the Department of Cell, Developmental & Cancer Biology. Dr. Tyner’s research is focused towards identification of cancer-causing gene targets in cancer patients and identification of patient-tailored, gene-targeted therapies. To accomplish these objectives, he has spent the past decade developing and implementing a functional screening approach whereby primary cells from hematologic malignancy patients can be tested ex vivo for sensitivity to a library of small-molecule inhibitors. This assay has now been cumulatively applied to over 2,500 patient specimens, and this large data set has been leveraged to inform findings that offer new diagnostic and therapeutic options.
Dr. Tyner attended undergraduate school at Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa, and graduate school at Washington University in St. Louis. His graduate work, focusing on asthma and respiratory viral infections, was conducted under the mentorship of Dr. Michael Holtzman. For his post-doctoral fellowship, he joined Dr. Brian Druker’s laboratory at OHSU where he studied molecular mechanisms of leukemogenesis