Dr. Demicco is a Staff Pathologist in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Mount Sinai Hospital, and Associate 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.
Bone and soft tissue sarcomas are rare tumors which, despite recent advances in diagnosis, remain poorly understood. Dr. Demicco's 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. Her 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, Dr. Demicco 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. She is 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 Dr. Demicco's 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. Her 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.
Dr. Demicco seeks 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.
Dr. Demicco also studies heterogeneity in pleomorphic sarcomas and genetic and histologic variations affect the tumor immune microeenvironment, in hopes of identifying promising avenues for immunotherapy.
Dr. Demicco is also an active collaborator in multiinstitutional sarcoma studies, helping to characterize new entities, rare entities, and rare presentations of more common tumors.
