Jed Ferguson MD, PhD

Personal Statement

Dr. Ferguson is an Assistant Professor and Urologic Oncologist in the Department of Urology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), and a member of the O’Neal Comprehensive Cancer Center (OCCC) at UAB. He has a joint appointment at the Birmingham-VA Medical Center (BVAMC) where he cares for veterans with urologic malignancies. He is the Cancer Liaison Physician for the American Cancer Society Committee on Cancer at BVAMC and has been deeply involved in quality monitoring and improvement in cancer care. Dr. Ferguson has helped establish a genitourinary (GU)-specific multidisciplinary tumor board, which has greatly facilitated multidisciplinary care for the veterans of BVAMC with GU cancers. He has also helped to establish cutting-edge technologies at the BVAMC including robotic surgery and an MRI-fusion prostate biopsy program. Dr. Ferguson’s father attended the US Coast Guard Academy and so he was raised with a deep respect for the US Military and finds profound satisfaction in giving back to those who gave so much for their fellow Americans.

Dr. Ferguson seeks to fully characterize the therapeutic vulnerabilities of a specific subset of bladder cancers, which he expects will lay the foundation for future proposals to investigate these new vulnerabilities in clinical trials. He hopes to translate findings from the lab to the clinic, and to improve outcomes for patients and especially veterans with bladder cancer.

Clinically, Dr. Ferguson’s focus is on the treatment of patients with cancers of the bladder, prostate, kidney, ureter, penis, and testis. His research focuses on a better understanding of the molecular drivers of bladder cancer, with the hope of developing and delivering new therapies to patients.

Education

• BA, University of Virginia - Charlottesville
• MD/PhD, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill
• Intern, Massachusetts General Hospital - Boston, MA
• Resident, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill
• Fellow, MD Anderson Cancer Center - Houston, TX

 Research Interests

• Characterization of Ankyrin Repeat and SOCS-box containing protein-4 (ASB4) in vascular development 
• A phase II clinical trial of Pazopanib in localized renal cell cancer, racial disparities in prostate cancer, economic outcomes of different surgical approaches to partial nephrectomy, and oncologic outcomes of kidney, penile, and bladder cancer  
• Molecular drivers of bladder cancer and immunooncology, pre-clinical models of bladder cancer including orthotopic xenografts and carcinogen-induced models, immunomodulatory effects of intravesically delivered adenoviral IFN gene therapy in bladder cancer, efficacy of the oral FGFR inhibitor erdafitinib in low-grade bladder cancer, urine flow-cytometry based assay for PDL-1 positivity in bladder cancer cells
• Evaluation of the clinical performance of EZH2 inhibitors in cancer

 Recent Publications

• Ferguson, JE 3rd, Rehman H, Chandrashekar DS, Varambally S. ARID1A-mutant and deficient bladder cancer is sensitive to EZH2 pharmacologic inhibition. bioRxiv. 2020 Jan. https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.01.12.426383
• Eich ML#, Ferguson JE 3rd*,#, Varambally S*. (*,# Shared first and last authorship). EZH2 targeted therapies in cancer: hype or a reality. Cancer Research. Sept 25, 2020. PMID 32978169
• Fang A, Ferguson JE 3rd. Penile Sparing Techniques for Penile Cancer. Postgraduate Medicine. Sept 10, 2020. PMID: 32907436
• Ferguson JE 3rd, Kamat AM. It's all about the perspective: Removing bias when co-managing patients with high-grade T1 bladder cancer and localized prostate cancer-A competing risks analysis. Urol Oncol. 2018 Feb;36(2):39-42. PMID: 29158136.
• Ferguson JE 3rd, Matin SF. Re: Targeting Renal Cell Carcinoma with a HIF-2 Antagonist. Eur Urol. 2017 Jun;71(6):987. PMID: 28237787.