Amir Goldkorn, MD

Amir Goldkorn, MD, is the Associate Director of Translational Sciences at USC Norris. He is a Professor of Medicine and Biochemistry & Molecular Medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California. Dr. Goldkorn obtained his bachelor’s degree from Harvard University (magna cum laude) and his Medical Degree at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he also completed his Internal Medicine residency. Subsequently, he trained in Hematology/Oncology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where he then remained for 3 additional years of postdoctoral research in the laboratory of Elizabeth Blackburn, a Nobel Laureate and discoverer of telomerase, the enzyme that lengthens and protects chromosome ends (telomeres).

Dr. Goldkorn is a board-certified medical oncologist and physician-scientist who is clinically subspecialized in genitourinary (GU) malignancies. Dr. Goldkorn’s laboratory is focused on developing the therapeutic and biomarker potential of liquid biopsies, cancer plasticity, and telomerase. His team leads liquid biopsy studies in phase III multi-center GU cancer trials sponsored by the NCI-SWOG cooperative group, where Dr. Goldkorn chairs translational medicine for prostate cancer. Dr. Goldkorn founded and directs a Liquid Biopsy Core at USC Norris, which offers state-of-the-art instrumentation and develops novel workflows for multiparametric analysis of liquid biopsies. In the area of cancer plasticity, Dr. Goldkorn’s group discovered that cancer cells can cyclically lose and regain cancer stem-like properties, and their current work is focused on elucidating epigenetic, epitranscriptomic, and metabolomic mechanisms that mediate this plasticity. Collectively, these research efforts are aimed at surmounting cancer heterogeneity and providing powerful new tools for precision cancer care.