Stanley R. Hamilton, M.D.

Dr. Hamilton is a gastrointestinal and molecular pathologist, and Professor and Head of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center (UTMDACC) since 1998. He has administrative responsibility for the clinical laboratories at UTMDACC, including the Molecular Diagnostics Laboratory, the Immunohistochemistry Laboratory and associated Image Analysis Laboratory, the Cytogenetics Laboratory that provides fluorescent in situ hybridization services, and the Flow Cytometry Laboratory. Under Dr. Hamilton’s administration, the Molecular Diagnostics Laboratory has expanded to carry out approximately 4,000 next generation sequencing assays on solid tumors yearly, and the MDL has analyzed over 10,000 solid tumors since Dr. Hamilton resourced multiplex testing in 2010.

Dr. Hamilton has been involved in research and clinical applications of the molecular pathology of gastrointestinal neoplasms since 1982. Of his 312 peer-reviewed publications, 205 address this topic, including two of the earliest evaluations of genomics as prognostic markers in colorectal adenocarcinoma. The microsatellite instability assay for The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) colorectal cancers status was done in the UTMDACC Molecular Diagnostics Laboratory under the direction of Dr. Hamilton, and the results of this analysis led to the identification of the novel polymerase-epsilon (POL E)-mutated “ultramutated” subset of the hypermutated colorectal cancers that were distinguished from those with microsatellite instability.

In addition, Dr. Hamilton has been active in the cooperative oncology group clinical trials setting for 20 years as a member of the Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group, now the ECOG-ACRIN Cancer Research Group in the National Clinical Trials Network (NCTN). He has published correlative studies of molecular biomarkers using specimens from ECOG clinical trials. The Clinical Laboratories at UTMDACC under his direction provided the pre-analytics and analytics for 2,843 tumors for E5202, the first integral-marker phase III clinical trial in colon cancer in the NCI cooperative group setting. The laboratories will provide the pre-analytics for 3,000 patients in the NCI-MATCH clinical trial (EAY131) that is coordinated by ECOG-ACRIN, and the Molecular Diagnostics Laboratory is one of the four selected MATCH network laboratories for the integral marker analytics.

Dr. Hamilton is a member of the ECOG-ACRIN Leadership as Deputy Chair for Laboratory Science and a member of the Disease Oriented Committee/Modality Oriented Committee (DOC/MOC). He continues to participate as pathologist for the Gastrointestinal Committee and has served since 1992 as Chair of the Laboratory Science and Pathology Committee that has responsibility for the ECOG-ACRIN Central Biorepository and Pathology Facility, formerly the ECOG Pathology Coordinating Office, which is located at UTMDACC, and for other ECOG-ACRIN core biorepositories. He is an ECOG-ACRIN representative on the NCI Group Banking Committee. He serves as the Principal Investigator for UTMDACC as a Scientific Member in ECOG-ACRIN and as a Lead Academic Participating Site (LAPS) in NCTN.