Rate My Professor Edus Warren

Edus Houston Warren, MD, PhD, known as Edus "Hootie" Warren, is a professor in the Translational Science and Therapeutics Division and the Immunology and Vaccine Development Program in the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. He also holds positions as an affiliate investigator in the Clinical Research Division, member of the Immunotherapy Integrated Research Center, Pathogen-Associated Malignancies Integrated Research Center, and Translational Data Science Integrated Research Center at Fred Hutch. Warren serves as Program Head for Global Oncology at Fred Hutch since 2017 and as Professor of Medicine in the Division of Hematology and Oncology and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology at the University of Washington School of Medicine. He is an attending physician at Fred Hutch, University of Washington Medical Center, and Seattle Children’s Hospital, specializing in medical oncology, hematopoietic stem cell transplantation, hematologic malignancies, lymphoma, and immunotherapy. Warren earned his AB in Applied Mathematics from Harvard College in 1982, PhD in Neurobiology from Harvard University in 1988, and MD from Harvard Medical School in 1991. He completed his internship and residency in Internal Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital from 1991 to 1993, followed by a fellowship in Medical Oncology at the University of Washington from 1993 to 1996.

Warren joined Fred Hutch in 1993 as a research associate in immunology and has spent over three decades advancing cancer immunology and immunotherapy. His laboratory focuses on harnessing T cells for cancer recognition and elimination, including development of T-cell therapy for advanced kidney cancer. Key contributions include designing and leading Fred Hutch’s first clinical trial of adoptive T-cell therapy for leukemia relapse after allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation, co-inventing high-throughput next-generation sequencing technology to analyze T- and B-cell antigen receptor repertoires, and investigating mechanisms of cancer regression after immune checkpoint inhibition, immunobiology of graft-versus-host disease and graft-versus-tumor effects, and pathogenesis of pathogen-associated malignancies such as Burkitt lymphoma in sub-Saharan Africa. Through collaborations with the Uganda Cancer Institute and China Initiative, he addresses infection-related cancers like EBV-associated lymphomas, HHV-8 sarcomas, HPV cervical cancer, and HBV/HCV liver cancers. Warren has mentored high school, undergraduate, doctoral, postdoctoral, and medical fellows and actively participates in clinical trials of novel agents for blood cancers. His work in Biology at Fred Hutch Cancer Center emphasizes cellular and molecular dissection of antitumor immune responses in global oncology contexts.