Johns Hopkins cancer researcher Chris Douville receives first Presidential Innovation Award

Christopher Douville, assistant professor of oncology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, whose work focuses on using novel machine learning methods to analyze blood and cerebrospinal fluid to detect cancer, was named last week to the inaugural Johns Hopkins University Winner of the University’s Presidential Innovation Award in recognition of his work and his commitment to academic pursuits.

The Chancellor’s Innovation Award, valued at $250,000, is awarded annually to early- to mid-career faculty who are focused on solving social problems and translating research findings beyond academia. The award, which builds on a range of commercialization support and resources provided by Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures, was presented in celebration of JHTV’s 10th anniversary. Duvel was selected from 28 nominees from across the school.

“As a graduate student and postdoctoral researcher, Chris worked with Hopkins faculty such as Burt Vogelstein, Chetan Bettegoda, Ken Kinzler, and Nick Papadopoulos — Hopkins’ original Innovation and Translation All-Stars — developing novel biomarkers, molecular technologies, said Johns Hopkins University President Ron Daniels during the April 10 awards ceremony .Hopkins’ vision for innovation.

Duval works in the field of computational biology, where he uses algorithms to understand cancer genetics and detect cancer early through liquid biopsies. In research published earlier this year in Science Translational Medicine, Douville and collaborators found that cancer patients have different amounts of repetitive DNA compared with people without cancer. Blood tests can reliably detect these abnormal early warning signs of cancer before symptoms appear.

“This award greatly advances my team’s conversion goals,” Duvel said. “Traditional funding mechanisms prioritize basic research and ignore critical steps such as reproducibility and scalability required for long-term use in patients. Our goal is not to write another manuscript that gets a lot of citations, but to create something that solves this problem. A question of technology.

“Hopkins has a long tradition of research excellence and the creation of technologies that shape patient care. I am honored and blessed to be a small part of this storied tradition.”

Douville received his PhD in biomedical engineering from Johns Hopkins University in 2017 and then completed a postdoc in the Bert Vogelstein and Kenneth Kinzler Ludwig Center Laboratory at the Johns Hopkins Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center Research. He has been a faculty member at the School of Medicine since 2019.

“Human creativity is the ability to combine two concepts or observations. Chris’s expertise in two different fields, machine learning and cancer biology, puts him in a unique position for creativity,” said Vogelstein . “I look forward to continued breakthroughs in his research, and particularly his development in implementing that research in real-world settings—a goal of the Presidential Innovation Award.”