George Poultsides, M.D. Associate Professor of Surgery

Research description: Dr. Poultsides is a surgical oncologist with expertise in the operative management of pancreatic and other gastrointestinal malignancies. In addition, a significant component of his scholarly activity focuses on the discovery of novel methods to assess the completeness of surgical resection for a variety of solid tumors. Through a unique collaboration with the department of chemistry at Stanford, he has prospectively evaluated the use of mass spectrometric imaging to molecularly assess surgical resection margins for pancreatic and gastric cancer, and has found this method to be a valuable adjunct to the current standard method of intraoperative margin assessment (frozen section analysis). He has also shown that the detection of specific mutations in circulating tumor DNA can be a very accurate tool to diagnose the presence of residual disease after hepatic resection for metastatic colon cancer, before this is detectable by cross-sectional imaging and/or tumor marker analysis. More recently, in collaboration with Dr. Eben Rosenthal at Stanford, he has completed the first in-human trial of intraoperative molecular imaging in patients undergoing resection of pancreas cancer using a fluorescently labeled anti-epidermal growth factor receptor (EFGR) antibody.

Dr. Poultsides also investigates pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors, a rare and poorly understood form of pancreatic cancer. A substantial volume of patients treated at Stanford with this diagnosis has enabled his research group to produce a considerable body of work characterizing the outcomes of operative management. They have been able to identify preoperative radiographic predictors of advanced grade (calcifications, hypoenhancement on computed tomography), which can guide the extent of surgical resection in terms of margins and lymph node dissection.

Dr. Poultsides has active collaborations with other members of the PCRG, including Drs. Longacre, Visser, Park, Fisher and Kunz.

Selected relevant publications (Stanford PCRG members in bold):

  1. Eberlin LS, Margulis K, Planell-Mendez I, Zare RN, Tibshirani R, Longacre TA, Jalali M, Norton JA, Poultsides GA. Pancreatic Cancer Surgical Resection Margins: Molecular Assessment by Mass Spectrometry Imaging. PLoS Med. 2016 Aug 30;13(8):e1002108.
  2.  Kidess E, Heirich K, Wiggin M, Vysotskaia V, Visser BC, Marziali A, Wiedenmann B, Norton JA, Lee M, Jeffrey SS, Poultsides GA. Mutation profiling of tumor DNA from plasma and tumor tissue of colorectal cancer patients with a novel, high-sensitivity multiplexed mutation detection platform. Oncotarget 2015 Feb 10;6(4):2549-61.
  3. Kin C, Kidess E, Poultsides GA, Visser BC, Jeffrey SS. Colorectal cancer diagnostics: biomarkers, cell-free DNA, circulating tumor cells and defining heterogeneous populations by single-cell analysis. Expert Rev Mol Diagn 2013 Jul;13(6):581-99.
  4. Poultsides GA, Reddy S, Cameron JL, Hruban RH, Pawlik TM, Ahuja N, Jain A, Edil BH, Schulick RD, Wolfgang CL. Histopathologic basis for the favorable survival after resection of Intraductal Papillary Mucinous Neoplasm – associated invasive pancreatic adenocarcinoma. Ann Surg 2010 Mar;251(3):470-6.
  5. Tran TB, Dua MM, Spain DA, Visser BC, Norton JA, Poultsides GA. Hepato-Pancreatectomy: How Morbid? Results from the National Surgical Quality Improvement Project. HPB (Oxford) 2015 Sep;17(9):763-9.
  6. Poultsides GA, Huang LC, Chen Y, Visser BC, Pai RK, Park WG, Chen AM, Kunz PL, Fisher GA, Norton JA. Pancreatic Neuroendocrine Tumors: Radiographic Calcifications Correlate with Grade and Metastasis. Ann Surg Oncol 2012 Jul;19(7):2295-303.
  7. Worhunsky DJ, Krampitz GW, Poullos PD, Visser BC, Kunz PL, Fisher GA, Norton JA, Poultsides GA. Pancreatic Neuroendocrine Tumors: Hypoenhancement on Arterial Phase Computed Tomography Predicts Biologic Aggressiveness. HPB (Oxford) 2014 Apr;16(4):304-11.