Joseph Franses
Assistant Professor
Department of Medicine
Joseph Franses’s research focuses on understanding the drivers of cancer metastasis and the tumor microenvironment. He uses novel microfluidic, imaging, and sequencing technologies to study the biology of circulating tumor cells and the interactions between cells within tumors that arise within the gastrointestinal tract. His clinical interests include the care of patients with liver and biliary tract cancers, and the development of clinical trials evaluating novel therapies and biomarkers for these diseases.
His work has been published in Cancer Discovery, Hepatology, Gastroenterology, Journal of Clinical Investigation, JCO Precision Oncology, Nature Communications, Clinical Cancer Research, Cancer Research, and Science Translational Medicine.
Franses completed BS degrees in chemical engineering and chemistry at Purdue University, and received his MD from Harvard Medical School. He also holds a PhD in biomedical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He completed an internal medicine residency at Massachusetts General Hospital. He then pursued a clinical fellowship in medical oncology at the combined Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital program. Most recently, he served as an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital.