Ranjit Bindra

Dr. Ranjit Bindra is a physician-scientist at the Yale School of Medicine, the Harvey and Kate Cushing Professor of Therapeutic Radiology, and the Scientific Director of the Yale Brain Tumor Center. Clinically, he treats adult and pediatric primary CNS cancers, as well as brain metastases using radiosurgery.

In the laboratory, his group recently led a team of four major laboratories at Yale, which reported the stunning discovery that IDH1/2-mutant tumors harbor a profound DNA repair defect that renders them exquisitely sensitive to PARP inhibitors. This work was published in Science Translational Medicine, Nature Genetics, and most recently in Nature, and it has received international attention with major clinical implications. Dr. Bindra is now translating this work directly into patients, in multiple phase I/II clinical trials. Most recently, Dr. Bindra discovered a novel approach to exploit DNA repair defects in cancer via DNA modification, which his group published in Science.

As an active biotech entrepreneur, he has founded six companies based on work from his laboratory, including Cybrexa Therapeutics, which is now in Phase I clinical trials. More recently, he founded Alphina Therapeutics, an early-stage biotech focused on targeting NAD metabolism in cancer, and Modifi Bio, based on DNA modification to exploit DDR defects. Under Bindra’s leadership as interim CEO, Modifi Bio was acquired by Merck and Company in the Fall of 2024.

Dr. Bindra received his undergraduate degree in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale University in 1998, and both his MD and PhD from the Yale School of Medicine in 2007. He completed his medical internship, radiation oncology residency, and post-doctoral research studies at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) in 2012.