Dr. Pasche has served as president and Chief Executive Officer of the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute and chair of the Department of Oncology at Wayne State University since 2023. Before joining Karmanos, he served as director of the Wake Forest Baptist Comprehensive Cancer Center (WFBCCC), principal investigator of the NCI CCSG award, and chair of the Department of Cancer Biology from 2014 until 2022. He was the first to identify and characterize TGFBR1*6A, an in-frame deletion within TGFBR1 exon 1, which has emerged as a low penetrance tumor susceptibility allele. Dr. Pasche is the co-inventor and principal developer of a novel medical device delivering amplitude-modulated radiofrequency electromagnetic fields for systemic targeted cancer treatment. The device is FDA-approved for the treatment of patients with advanced hepatocellular carcinoma who fail first- and second-line therapy.
A native of Switzerland, Dr. Pasche earned his doctorate of medicine and doctorate of philosophy from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, and another doctorate of medicine from the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Dr. Pasche completed an internship and residency in internal medicine at the New York Hospital at Cornell University Medical Center. He also went on to complete a hematology and oncology fellowship at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and a second postdoctoral fellowship at Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research