Dr. Samuel Singer

Dr. Samuel Singer, MD, FACS, is a surgical oncologist specializing exclusively in the diagnosis and treatment of soft tissue sarcoma, and one of only a few surgeons in the world with a practice devoted solely to this group of cancers. He leads the Soft Tissue Sarcoma Disease Management Team at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, a multidisciplinary group of soft tissue pathologists, medical oncologists, and radiation oncologists who collaborate to develop individualized treatment plans for each patient. His years of focused clinical experience have allowed him to devise surgical techniques that improve the ability to completely remove these tumors, and he brings special expertise in multimodality treatment, combining surgery with radiation, chemotherapy, or targeted therapy when appropriate.

Soft tissue sarcomas present a significant clinical challenge given that there are more than 50 subtypes, each relatively uncommon. Dr. Singer's team treats a higher volume of sarcoma patients than virtually any other medical group in the world, and outcomes for patients managed by such specialized, multidisciplinary centers of excellence are consistently superior. In addition to his clinical work, he leads both a National Cancer Institute Specialized Program in Research Excellence (SPORE) and the Sarcoma Genome Project. His laboratory research focuses on discovering the DNA and RNA alterations that drive sarcoma development and progression, with the goal of improving diagnostic accuracy and the ability to predict treatment outcomes for individual patients, enabling more precisely tailored therapies.

Dr. Singer has been actively involved in developing and designing several targeted therapies for sarcoma, including anti-angiogenesis therapy for soft tissue sarcoma, imatinib (Gleevec) for gastrointestinal stromal sarcoma, and cell cycle kinase inhibitors targeting CDK4, AURKA, and PLK1, as well as demethylating agents, HDAC inhibitors, and PPAR gamma ligands for various liposarcomas. His research aims to identify new targeted treatments directed at specific alterations in particular tumor types, ultimately improving survival and quality of life for patients with these complex malignancies.