Alan Tan, MD

Alan Tan, MD, is Vice President of MRD Research and Clinical Strategy at Tempus and an Associate Professor of Medicine in the Division of Hematology and Oncology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. He is a board-certified medical oncologist specializing in genitourinary cancers and melanoma at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center in Nashville, Tennessee, with a clinical practice dedicated to bladder cancer, kidney cancer, and prostate cancer.

Dr. Tan served as Genitourinary Executive Officer for the Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology, an NCI National Clinical Trials Network cooperative group that designs and runs large national trials. In that role he helped oversee the group's portfolio of bladder, kidney, and prostate cancer trials. Before joining Vanderbilt in 2024, he was Director of Genitourinary Oncology and Precision Medicine at Rush University in Chicago.

His research focuses on biomarker development, circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) and molecular residual disease (MRD) testing, and treatment de-escalation strategies in genitourinary cancers. He is senior author of studies of longitudinal ctDNA testing in metastatic kidney cancer and in postsurgical melanoma surveillance, and a coauthor of work on tumor-informed ctDNA around radical cystectomy, MRD in germ cell tumors, and the phase 3 AMBASSADOR trial of adjuvant pembrolizumab in muscle-invasive urothelial carcinoma.

Views expressed on MRD Watch are his own and not those of Tempus or Vanderbilt.