Daruka Mahadevan, MD, PhD

Daruka Mahadevan, MD, PhD, is a professor of medicine at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. He serves as co-chair and director of research at the UT Health San Antonio Multispecialty and Research Hospital. He is an internationally recognized physician-scientist in hematology and medical oncology.

Mahadevan earned a Bachelor of Science in physiology and biochemistry from the University of Reading in England and a doctorate in protein crystallography from the University of London. He received his Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (MD equivalent) from King’s College Hospital Medical School at the University of London. He completed his residency in internal medicine at the University of Connecticut Health Center and a hematology-oncology fellowship at the University of Arizona Health Sciences Center. He is board-certified by the American Board of Internal Medicine and the American Board of Medical Oncology.

His major areas of interest include early-phase treatments for pancreatic cancer, gastrointestinal stromal tumors, myelodysplastic syndromes and non-Hodgkin lymphoma, including chronic lymphocytic leukemia. He has led or co-led early-phase clinical trials investigating new cancer agents, with funding from several National Institutes of Health grants and cancer research foundations. He also directed a drug discovery laboratory program based on his expertise in protein crystallography, leading to six U.S. patents for drugs targeting novel driver oncogenes—new cancer mutations that initiate or sustain cancer growth.

One of the drugs he developed, amuvatinib, targets c-Kit/c-Met/PDGFR/RAD51 and has advanced through Phase I and II clinical trials. As principal investigator or co-principal investigator on several NIH and foundation grants, he has established proof-of-concept in drug discovery (R01 AKT PH domain inhibitors) and drug development (NSF prostate cancer translational drug development, SPORE in lymphoma for Aurora kinase inhibitor therapy, and SWOG Hope Foundation targeted therapeutics for aggressive B- and T-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma).

He has participated in multiple National Cancer Institute (NCI) advisory and leadership meetings, including external advisory board sessions and scientific leadership committee meetings. He received an NCI P30 supplement (2017–2019) to study rare cancers through whole-exome sequencing of tumor and normal samples in collaboration with the University of Arizona Genomics Core. From 2016 to 2019, he served as director of the Early Phase Therapeutics Program (“Phase I Program”), enrolling more than 150 patients in first-in-human investigational agent studies for both solid and hematologic malignancies.

Mahadevan continues to expand the early-phase therapeutics portfolio and investigator-initiated studies at UT Health San Antonio.