Elizabeth Demicco

Dr. Demicco is a Staff Pathologist in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Mount Sinai Hospital, and Professor in the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology, University of Toronto.

She earned her combined MD and PhD from Boston University of Medicine, and completed residency training at the Massachusetts General Hospital.

She subsequently completed two fellowships in Selective Pathology (Soft Tissue & Cancer Biomarkers) at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, and spent 5 years as an academic pathologist subspecializing in Bone & Soft Tissue and Head & Neck Pathology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, before joining the faculty at Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto.

Research Synopsis

Bone and soft tissue sarcomas are rare tumors which, despite recent advances in diagnosis, remain poorly understood. My past work in the field of pathology has focused on characterizing features of soft tissue sarcomas using immunohistochemical and molecular studies together with morphologic and clinical data to build integrated models predicting tumor behavior or describing the interplay between histologic and molecular phenotypes. My work ranges from small scale translational pathology projects to large-scale multi-institutional collaborative efforts to better understand cancer genomics and tumor interactions with the immune microenvironment.

As part of these collaborative efforts, I served as a co-chair on The Cancer Genome Atlas Sarcoma working group, and helped to craft the final manuscript resulting from the efforts of the Pan-Cancer Atlas Pan-Immune working group describing the immune landscape across 10,000 cancers. I am currently involved in the Clinical Proteomic Tumor Analysis Consortium, providing both pathology and disease expertise to the sarcoma working group, and aiding in pathologic interpretation of multimodal deep learning pancancer analyses. 

The focus of my personal research has primarily been on solitary fibrous tumors, an uncommon mesenchymal neoplasm arising at all anatomic sites, and representing a spectrum of disease encompassing tumors formerly referred to as hemangiopericytoma. My work in this area has focused on refining better risk stratification schemes to predict which tumors will metastasize, using reproducible objective clinicopathologic criteria, and the risk stratification model resulting from this work has become widely used in clinical practice.

I seek to better understand the underlying molecular events contributing to aggressive behavior in SFT, using methylation profiling to detect epigenetic alterations, genetic data from exome sequencing, as well as protein expression data from tissue microarrays. 

I also study heterogeneity in pleomorphic sarcomas and genetic and histologic variations affect the tumor immune microeenvironment, in hopes of identifying promising avenues for immunotherapy.

Lastly, I am an active collaborator in multiinstitutional sarcoma studies, helping to characterize new entities, rare entities, and rare presentations of more common tumors.

Selected Publications

Dehner CA, Sadegh D, Boulos F, Messias N, Wang WL, Demicco EG, Chrisinger JSA. Clear cell stromal tumor of the lung with YAP1::TFE3 fusion: four cases including case with highly aggressive clinical course. Histopathology 2022 Aug; 81(2):239-245.

Xu B, Rooper L, Dermawan JKT, Zhang Y, Suurmeijer AJH, Dickson BC, Demicco EG, Antonescu CR. Mesenchymal Chondrosarcoma of the Head and Neck with HEY1::NCOA2 Fusion: a Clinicopathologic and Molecular Study of 13 Cases with Emphasis on Diagnostic Pitfalls. Genes Chromosomes & Cancer. 2022 Jun 7. 

Dehner CA, Baker JC, Bell R, Dickson BC, Schmidt RE, Demicco EG, Chrisinger JSA. Xanthogranulomatous epithelial tumors and keratin-positive giant cell-rich soft tissue tumors: two aspects of a single entity with frequent HMGA2-NCOR2 fusions. Modern Pathology 2022 Jun 11. 

Han R, Dermawan JK, Demicco EG, Ferguson PC, Griffin AM, Swanson D, Antonescu CR, Dickson BC. ZP64::NCOA3 rearrangement defines a novel subset of spindle cell rhabdomyosarcoma. Genes Chromosomes & Cancer 2022 May 6. 

Lacambra MD, Antonescu CR, Chow C, Chiu WK, Demicco EG, Ferguson PC, Swanson D, To KF, Zhang L, Dickson BC. Expanding the spectrum of mesenchymal tumors with NR1D1-rearrangement. Genes Chromosomes & Cancer. 2022 Jul; 61(7):420-426. 

Swami VG, Demicco EG, Naraghi A, White LM. Soft tissue solitary fibrous tumors of the musculoskeletal system: spectrum of MRI appearances and characteristic imaging features. Skeletal Radiology. 2022 Apr;51(5):807-817. 

Guram S, Covelli AM, O'Neill AC, Shultz DB, Demicco EG, Gupta AA, Gladdy RA. Multidisciplinary intervention in radiation-associated angiosarcoma of the breast: Patterns of recurrence and response to treatment. Annals of Surgical Oncology. 2022 Jan; 29(1):522-53

Bubola J, MacMillan CM, Demicco EG, Chami EA, Chung CT, Leong I, Marrano P, Onkal Z, Swanson D, Veremis BM, Weinreb I, Zhang L, Antonescu CR, Dickson BC. Targeted RNA sequencing in the routine clinical detection of fusion genes in salivary gland tumors. Genes Chromosomes Cancer. 2021 Oct;60(10):695-708.

Schaefer IM, Lundberg M, Demicco EG, Przybyl J, Matusiak M, Chibon F, Ingram DR, Hornick JL, Wang WL, Bauer S, Baker LH, Lazar AJ, van de Rijn M, Marino-Enriquez A, Fletcher JA. Relationships between highly recurrent tumor suppressor alterations in 489 leiomyosarcomas. Cancer 2021 Aug 1;127(15):2666-2763. 

Stacchiotti, S, Frezza AM, Blay JY, Baldini EH, Bonvalot S, Bovée JVMG, Callegaro D, Casali PG, Chiang RC, Demetri GD, Demicco EG, Desai J, Eriksson M, Gelderblom H, George S, Gounder M, Gronchi A, Gupta A, Haas R, Hayes A, Hohenberger P, Jones KB, Jones RL, Kasper B, Kawai A, Kirsch DG, Kleinerman ES, Le Cesne A, Lim J, López MDC, Maestro R, Marcos-Gragera R, Martin Broto J, Matsuda Olivier Mir T, Patel SR, Raut CP, Razak A, Reed DR, Rutkowski P, Sanfilippo RG, Sbaraglia M, Schaefer IM, Strauss D, Sundby Hall K, Tap W, Thomas DM, Van der Graaf W, van Houdt WJ, Visser O, vonMehren M, Wagner AJ, Wilky BA, Won YJ, Fletcher C, Dei Tos AP, Trama A, Ultra-rare sarcomas, a consensus paper from the Connective Tissue Oncology Society community of experts on the incidence threshold and the list of entities. Cancer. 2021 Aug 15; 127(16):2934-2942. 

Honours and Awards

2020 AACR Team Science Award, TCGA Current Project Team, Team Member