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Jon Aster, MD, PhD

Scientific Advisor

Jon Aster is a Professor of Pathology and Chief of the Division of Hematopathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He is also Director of the Specialized Histopathology Core, a CLIA licensed research facility that supports the 1100+ PIs of the Dana Farber/Harvard Cancer Center. For over 20 years, Jon has studied Notch signaling in various cancers, therapeutic targeting of Notch, and Notch related biomarker test development and implementation.


Jon’s lab has led or collaborated on work that has produced a number of firsts in Notch signaling, including production of the first mouse model of Notch leukemia; demonstrating that Notch signals can induce T cell development from bone marrow progenitors; demonstrating that T-ALL cells depend on continued Notch signaling for growth; detecting and characterizing frequent Notch1 mutations in human and murine T-ALL; solving key Notch structures at high resolution, including the structures of Notch transcription complexes on DNA; identification of Myc and mTOR as important downstream targets of leukemogenic Notch signaling; development of the first selective antibody inhibitor of specific Notch receptors; report of genome-wide Notch1 binding patterns in cancer cell genomes; and the description of Notch1 loss-of-function mutations in human squamous cell carcinomas.