Michelle Afkhami, M.D., is a clinical professor of pathology with subspecialties in hematopathology, clinical informatics, and molecular genomics pathology. She serves as the division chief of Molecular Pathology and Therapy Biomarkers, where she also holds the CLIA directorship and oversees the regulatory and quality assurance requirements of the COH Clinical Molecular Genomics and Cytogenomics Laboratory. Additionally, she has chaired the multidisciplinary Genomic Tumor Board since 2015.
She received her medical degree in Iran after completing two years of residency in general surgery at the University of Southern California (USC) and Huntington Memorial Hospital. She then changed career paths and completed anatomic and clinical pathology residency at USC, followed by a fellowship in hematopathology at USC and a second fellowship in molecular genomics pathology at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC).
Over the past 24 years, she has collaborated with hematology, solid tumor, and molecular research teams, as well as clinical laboratories at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, USC, UCLA, UPMC, and City of Hope (COH). She is passionate about discovering and understanding the molecular pathways involved in malignancies, believing that this knowledge will lead to more accurate diagnoses, individualized risk assessments, measurable minimal residual disease detection, and more effective personalized therapies.
As a physician and clinical scientist, her primary focus is on providing clinically relevant molecular genomics testing for patients at City of Hope (COH). She has led the design and development of multiple versions of multigene next-generation sequencing panels, including the HopeSeq Comprehensive Assays, which have served more than 200,000 COH patients since 2015. Her research interests center on dissecting the molecular mechanisms underlying cancer transformation in both solid tumors and hematopoietic malignancies. She has been an active member of several disease-specific teams at City of Hope, including those focused on lung and thoracic cancers, melanoma, head and neck, thyroid, neuro-oncology, leukemia, the Toni Stephenson Lymphoma Center, and the Briskin Myeloma Center. As a principal investigator on multiple studies, and in close collaboration with these disease teams, her work has been presented at numerous national and international conferences and published in a variety of peer-reviewed journals.
