Dr. Joel Neal holds a medical degree and a doctoral degree in Tumor Cell Biology from Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois. Subsequently, he completed a fellowship in oncology, rotating through the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Division of Oncology at the Stanford Cancer Institute at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.
Dr. Neal’s primary clinical interest is in thoracic oncology. In addition to maintaining an active practice, he focuses on the design and conduct of clinical trials involving targeted therapies and immunotherapy for lung cancer and mesothelioma. He has published dozens of articles in the field of thoracic oncology, including in Lancet Oncology, Nature Medicine, and the Journal of Clinical Oncology. He is a member of the International Association of the Study of Lung Cancer (IALSC), is a study chair and thoracic core committee member within the ECOG-ACRIN cooperative group, and has presented at a number of American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) annual meetings.
Dr. Neal designs and conducts clinical trials of novel therapies in collaboration with other researchers and pharmaceutical companies. These generally focus on two areas:
- targeted therapies against particular mutations in cancers (for example EGFR, ALK, ROS1, HER2, KRAS, MET, and others) and
- the emerging field of immunotherapy in cancer, using anti PD-1/PD-L1 therapies in combination with other agents, and also developing cellular therapies.
Dr. Neal also collaborates with other researchers on campus to apply emerging technologies to cancer therapy, for example, circulating tumor DNA detection.