David Ting MD, on Early Detection, Cancer Innovation, and the Path from Discovery to Patients

A preview of the conversations shaping WMIF 2026

Register Now: 2026.worldmedicalinnovation.org

David Ting MD has spent 15 years asking what the rest of the genome is doing. As a cancer researcher and clinician at MGB, his work is helping reshape how oncology leaders think about diagnosis, therapy, and the long road from a laboratory finding to a treatment a patient can actually receive. His perspective also reflects the kind of exchange at the center of the World Medical Innovation Forum, where scientific discovery, clinical insight, capital, and industry strategy come together in one room.

Presented in Boston by Mass General Brigham in collaboration with Bank of America, WMIF 2026 returns September 22-23 at the Westin Boston Seaport District. Register now to join the conversations shaping how healthcare innovation moves from discovery to clinical adoption and real-world impact.

Catching Cancer Earlier

For Ting, the path to a cure begins with detection. Patients still arrive at the clinic too late, when available therapies often cannot deliver the outcome that clinicians and patients want most. The earlier a cancer is found, the greater the chance of curing it, which is why screening-level diagnostics remain one of the most important frontiers in oncology.

The barrier is technological. Most diagnostics were designed to confirm disease in symptomatic patients, not to detect it in asymptomatic patients. What the field needs are tests sensitive enough to detect the earliest signals in the body, before a patient knows anything is wrong and before the cancer has advanced beyond the best opportunity for intervention.

The 98 Percent of the Genome We Have Ignored

Only about 2% of the human genome codes for proteins. Much of drug and diagnostic development has focused on that small slice, while the remaining noncoding genome, sometimes called the dark genome, was long dismissed as junk. Ting’s lab has spent more than a decade helping show that this unexplored territory may be far more important than previously understood.

Repetitive sequences and other noncoding regions may hold important diagnostic and therapeutic potential across cancer and other diseases. Ting describes them as part of a much larger biological landscape, one connected not only to solid tumors but also to neurodegenerative disease, chronic viral infection, and aging. That makes the dark genome one of the most promising untapped areas in medicine, with implications that extend well beyond oncology.

A New Wave of Therapeutic Modalities

Cancer drug development moves in waves, and the current one is not a departure from precision oncology. It is a deepening of it. Ting points to several modalities converging at once, each expanding what it means to target cancer more precisely and deliver therapies more effectively.

Antibody-drug conjugates deliver toxic payloads directly to cancer cells. New cellular therapies are reaching tumors once considered inaccessible. Novel small molecules are degrading proteins long considered undruggable, including KRAS. Each wave builds on the last; none replaces precision targeting, but each extends its reach.

The Funding Gap That Stops Good Science

Ask Ting where promising cancer research dies, and the answer is not usually the science. It is the financing. Federal and academic funding can support fundamental discovery, and later-stage clinical trials may attract support once a program is mature enough, but the middle is where many promising ideas stall.

That middle stage requires turning a promising target into a compound, platform, or modality that is safe and robust enough to move into humans. It is expensive, specialized, and often too translational for traditional academic funding, but too early for many commercial investors. Closing that gap is one of the biggest structural barriers to getting cancer innovations across the finish line.

Scientific Momentum Is Not Translational Readiness

It is easy to confuse scientific momentum with translational readiness. Scientific momentum is the excitement around a discovery that may change the field. Translational readiness is something else entirely: the difficult work of making a drug, assay, or platform robust, consistent, and safe enough to deploy in the clinic.

Conflating the two is how programs stall. A finding can be genuinely important and still be years away from a patient. Recognizing the difference is what separates discoveries that are published from innovations that can eventually reach clinical practice.

Why MGB Sits at the Center

Ting credits MGB with being uniquely equipped to move discoveries in both directions across the bench-to-bedside cycle. A laboratory finding can inform a clinical diagnosis, while an observation in a patient can drive new basic science. That loop is not linear; it is iterative and depends on having scientists, clinicians, and patients connected within the same ecosystem.

That bidirectional flow, from basic science to clinical practice and from clinical observation back to basic science, is what makes the MGB innovation ecosystem powerful. Few institutions have all those access points in one place, and fewer still have the structure to keep ideas moving between them.

AI as a Co-Pilot, Not a Replacement

Ting sees AI’s earliest impact in oncology arriving on the care side rather than replacing discovery. AI can help educate patients on the complexities of treatment, serve as a companion during the long stretches when clinicians are not in the room, and synthesize a sprawling clinical chart into a format an oncologist can act on quickly.

The promise is improved communication with patients and greater clinic efficiency, but only once the underlying platforms are validated to modern medical standards. Getting an AI system to 99 percent reliability is the hard problem. Until that threshold is met, AI should be treated as a co-pilot that supports clinicians and patients, not as a replacement for expert judgment.

Repurposing What Already Works

Some of the most exciting opportunities are not new molecules at all. Drugs developed for one indication, sometimes even drugs that failed in their original purpose, can find unexpected utility in cancer. Ting points to thalidomide as one example: harmful in one setting, but later an important therapy in myeloma.

The compound is the same; the context is different. MGB has built a clinical infrastructure to test well-characterized drugs in new disease settings, an approach that can compress timelines and costs. In a field where the path from discovery to treatment is often long and expensive, repurposing offers another route to clinical impact.

Continue the Conversation at WMIF 2026

Ting’s perspective captures the questions at the center of the World Medical Innovation Forum: Which discoveries are ready to move? Where are the financing and commercialization gaps? How can clinicians, scientists, investors, and industry leaders accelerate the path from breakthrough science to patient impact?

These are the kinds of conversations that will define WMIF 2026 in Boston. The Forum will bring together senior healthcare executives, top investors, leading Harvard clinicians and scientists, entrepreneurs, and government officials for candid dialogue on the innovations changing medicine at speed and scale.

Register Now: 2026.worldmedicalinnovation.org

September 22-23, 2026 | Westin Boston Seaport District

David T. Ting MD is a physician scientist, cancer biologist, and bioengineer, is currently Scientific Director of the Mass General Brigham Cancer Institute.  Dr. Ting’s lab works on understanding RNA expression patterns in cancer to gain biological insight into the role of tumor heterogeneity in cancer progression, develop biomarkers applicable to the clinic, and to identify novel therapeutic avenues against cancer.  His group discovered the aberrant expression of repeat RNAs that appear to play an important role in both the tumor microenvironment and metastasis. Using single cell and spatial technologies, his group has pioneered analysis of repeat RNAs to understand tumor heterogeneity.  In parallel, these single cell technologies have been applicated to circulating tumor cells (CTCs) that have been isolated with microfluidic enrichment technologies to understand the molecular underpinnings of cancer metastasis and provide a path for blood based biomarkers. He has founded 3 biotech companies based on the research in his lab including ROME Therapeutics, PanTher Therapeutics, and TellBio, Inc.

Dr. Ting received his BS in chemical engineering and biology from MIT, and he completed his medical degree at Harvard Medical School from the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology program with magna cum laude honors. During his undergraduate and medical school studies, he trained with Dr. Robert Langer at MIT on drug delivery platforms and did a Howard Hughes Medical Institute fellowship at the Whitehead Institute at MIT working on stem cell biology with Dr. George Daley, current Dean of Harvard Medical School. He completed internal medicine residency at the MGH and medical oncology fellowship in the combined Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and MGH Cancer Center program. He moved on to post-doctoral training with Daniel Haber’s group at the MGH Cancer Center working on CTCs and novel RNA biomarkers in cancer.