Toby T. Hecht, PhD

Associate Director

Translational Research Program

Division of Cancer Treatment and Diagnosis,
National Cancer Institute
9609 Medical Center Drive, Room 3W110
MSC 9726
Bethesda, MD 20892
Phone (240) 276-5730
Fax (240) 276-7881
Email: hechtt@mail.nih.gov

Toby T. Hecht has led the Translational Research Program (TRP) for over 15 years. She earned a PhD in viral immunology from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and conducted her postdoctoral research at Yale University in somatic cell genetics before coming to NIH, where she worked in three Institutes–NIDCR, NIAID, and the NCI–over 44 years. Thirty-six of those years were spent in NCI Extramural Program activities and biological agent development for the benefit of cancer patients. She has guided many projects (from conception to testing in the clinic to approval and licensing) through the former NCI Rapid Access to Intervention Development (RAID) program, now known as the NCI Experimental Therapeutics (NExT) program. She was the project manager for the early stages of cetuximab (2004 approval) and dinutuximab (2015 approval) development, therapies that are widely used for EGFR mutant tumors and GD2-bearing tumors, respectively, and many other projects. During her tenure as the SPORE Director, the program grew in budget and scope beyond traditional organ site projects and has been accepting and awarding grant applications in thematic areas, such as cancer health disparities, epigenetics, radiation sensitization, pediatric cancers, and cross-cutting cancers that rely on similar signaling pathway alterations. She also integrated the SPORE planning grant (P20) grantees in cancer health disparities (sponsored by the NCI Center to Reduce Cancer Health Disparities) into the larger SPORE community to encourage closer collaborations between investigators with common interests. In addition, in 2015 she became the Deputy Director of DCTD. During the eight years of working across DCTD programs, she instituted a network of canine cancer clinical trials as a model for human immunotherapy and established an Integrated Canine Data Commons (ICDC) as a functional node in the NCI Cancer Research Data Commons (CRDC) so that investigators can use comparative oncology data and analytical tools to gain better insight into the biology and treatment of human disease. Recently, she initiated a collaboration across DCTD Programs to establish the Glioblastoma Therapeutics Network (GTN), which develops novel therapeutics and combinations of drugs that can cross the blood-brain barrier and tests them in early-phase clinical trials.