Yousef Zakharia, MD

I am a medical oncologist and hematologist, and I specialize in genitourinary malignancy and melanoma, I am currently an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Iowa and Holden Comprehensive Cancer Center, where I see patients with these types of malignancies. Being at a major academic comprehensive cancer center, I prefer to treat my patients on clinical trials whenever available, and I have gained significant interest in phase I trials design during my training at Georgia Regents University, where I have participated in many phase I investigator initiated clinical trials, and some of them are currently multi- center ones. I am working on a new investigator initiated phase I study combining high dose selenium with axitinib in metastatic clear cell renal cell carcinoma, in collaboration with our scientist at the University of Iowa who have worked on selenium and others from Roswell Park Cancer Institute who have exciting preclinical data for the afore mentioned combination. Another ongoing Phase I clinical trial in melanoma is combining Indoximod as IDO inhibitor with Ipilimumab in metastatic melanoma, I was involved in designing the trial and writing up the protocol, and it is now multi-center study.