Ranjit S. Bindra, MD, PhD

Ranjit S. Bindra, MD, PHD, is therapeutic radiologist who specializes in the treatment of adult and pediatric primary brain tumors and brain metastases. He is the co-director of the Yale Brain Tumor Center at Smilow Cancer Hospital.

Dr. Bindra became a therapeutic radiologist to help patients with cancer and to translate work he was doing in the research laboratory into the clinic. As an oncology resident, he had met a number of young patients with brain cancer that couldn’t be cured, so doctors could only offer them palliative care. He wanted to do more. There are always examples in the medical literature where incurable cancers were cured, or overall survival was doubled, Dr. Bindra says.

In his research laboratory, Dr. Bindra is involved in the development and implementation of several precision medicine-based clinical trials for gliomas and other central nervous system tumors. He has led basic science studies and received international attention for a recent publication that showed a profound DNA repair defect in what are known as IDH1/2-mutant tumors that renders them exquisitely sensitive to drugs called PARP inhibitors—a result that has important clinical implications.

As a biotech entrepreneur, Dr. Bindra co-founded Cybrexa Therapeutics, a company focused on developing an entirely new class of small molecule DNA repair inhibitors, which directly target the tumor microenvironment.