“How can I deliver care not just to the 100,000 patients who might have cancer but to the 500,000 patients who may be at risk of cancer?”
That question is shaping the early tenure of Anirban Maitra, MD, who recently began serving as director of New York City-based NYU Langone’s Perlmutter Cancer Center.
A pancreatic cancer researcher and pathologist focused on translational science, Dr. Maitra spent more than a decade at Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins, where he led a pancreatic cancer research laboratory. In 2013, he was recruited to Houston-based University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center as founding director of its Pancreatic Cancer Research Center, overseeing translational research and clinical trial efforts.
He joined NYU Langone in September as associate director of translational research and co-director of a new GI Cancer Center focused on pancreatic and other gastrointestinal cancers.
Following a national search, Dr. Maitra was selected to lead the Perlmutter Cancer Center in January, taking the helm from Alec Kimmelman, MD, PhD, who was appointed as CEO and dean of NYU Grossman School of Medicine.
He spoke to Becker’s about his top priorities as director and his vision for expanding access to clinical trials, scaling precision oncology and leveraging NYU’s integrated health system to move cancer care upstream.
Editor’s note: Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Question: As you step into the director role, what are your top strategic priorities for Perlmutter over the next three to five years? How do you see those priorities aligning with NYU Langone’s broader quality and growth agenda?
Dr. Anirba Maitra: There are a few priority areas that I really want us to build, one of which is our portfolio of clinical trials in both the solid tumor and liquid tumor space. We are very fortunate that the Perlmutter Cancer Center catchment area extends from the middle of Manhattan to the farthest end of Long Island in Suffolk County. My goal is to make sure that we are able to deliver the best clinical trials for individuals who are in these areas, where they don’t have to necessarily come into the city but can receive their care, both cancer care and access to clinical trials, in terms of where they live.
The second priority for me is how do we deliver care beyond established cancer itself. One of the main reasons why I moved to NYU versus to another freestanding cancer center in the city is because we have an integrated healthcare system with a unified electronic medical record across all our sites. That allows us to serve as the first conduit of access for patients. An NYU physician is often the first point of contact with the healthcare system for a patient who may have nothing to do with cancer yet. How can I deliver care not just to the 100,000 patients who might have cancer but to the 500,000 patients who may be at risk of cancer? This would mean partnerships with our primary care doctors and partnerships with our internal medicine specialties.
Within clinical trials, there are certain areas that I am particularly passionate about expanding. There are a lot of new agents in the clinical realm that can be used in solid tumors as well as liquid malignancies, everything from adoptive cell therapies to bispecifics.
We are an NCI-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center, so we want to continue to build on the existing research programs that we have and recruit new faculty to be involved in areas where there are some gaps that we need to fill.
Q: Your research career has focused heavily on early detection and biomarker development and NYU Langone has committed to systemwide liquid biopsy and tumor DNA sequencing. What operational and financial challenges do health systems face when moving molecular profiling from a specialty offering to a standard-of-care expectation for every cancer patient?
AM: Think of it as a journey for an individual from early detection, getting diagnosed, getting treated and then being followed up. There are multiple points where precision medicine or molecular sequencing could come in, some before the cancer manifests itself and some after, at the time of therapy and beyond. The reimbursements and approvals are different based on what you’re talking about.
For example, in the early detection space, a liquid biopsy for colorectal cancer early diagnosis is covered by the FDA, but pancreatic cancer is not covered. There are individuals who are able to pay out of pocket for tests that are not covered by insurance, but there are vast swaths of the population who will not be able to pay for this.
With that said, Congress recently passed the Nancy Gardner Sewell Medicare Multi-Cancer Early Detection Screening Coverage Act as part of the appropriations bill. It doesn’t actually approve any particular assay, but it clears a path for these liquid biopsies for early detection to file for FDA approval and for CMS reimbursement. I think there is a keen desire in the population at large that these assays should not only be available to those who can pay for it, but that there should be a way for insurance to also pay for it as well.
I think that the approval landscape will increase to the point where tests will be more accessible to anyone with health insurance. In terms of sequencing at the time of diagnosis, for the most part today in 2026 it is almost always reimbursable, with some exceptions. If you are diagnosed with cancer, especially with advanced cancer, sequencing is part of the standard of care in some respects. The goal of the Center for Molecular Oncology is to do that one way or the other. If insurance will pay for it, that’s fine, but we will leverage our partnerships, we will leverage philanthropy, we will make it happen.
And then you get more into a research setting, where hopefully the value proposition is increasingly building, which involves the serial follow-up of patients for changing molecular features in the face of treatment. That’s going to be the next step of where I think the field would like to build the evidence base to get to a point where CMS will reimburse for it.
Q: As you build out Perlmutter’s next phase, what workforce strategies do you see as most critical to sustaining growth in complex cancer care?
AM: I’m a big believer in the model of shared healthcare delivery, in the sense that I think that physicians are not necessarily the only way to go here. There’s a lot of care that can be delivered by advanced practice providers. We have a wonderful system of shared decision-making and operational support with our nursing and APP staff participating in the care.
As we expand increasingly into the community, there are opportunities for us to be creative in how we leverage our oncology-trained staff who are nonphysicians to be able to deliver that care, knowing that there are physicians available in close proximity to be able to step in or guide the care if needed. It makes care delivery quicker, more efficient and access is faster. You hear these stories all the time about it taking six months to get an appointment. There’s a lot that you can do with APPs and other qualified care providers. Why wait for weeks for a physician appointment when you can get the ball rolling?
Expansion is linked not only to hiring the best-qualified physicians. Of course we are heavily recruiting in all of the specialty areas but I’m also committed to making sure that care is delivered efficiently with the same rigor across our network and some of that will require us to expand our APP capabilities with uncompromised safety and quality.
Q: What innovation or breakthrough do you believe has the greatest potential to fundamentally change how health systems deliver cancer care over the next decade?
AM: To me, it is the use of AI in leveraging seemingly unrelated but actually deeply related, structured information from our electronic medical records and potentially from our internet searches to enable earlier diagnosis of cancer or identify those who may be at risk. Leveraging AI in electronic medical records of the last 10 years — that now we can access thanks to Epic — for somebody in our integrated healthcare system and saying “There are signs here that suggest that you might be at higher risk for lung cancer even though you’re not a smoker. We think you might benefit from surveillance.” That’s the magic.
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