Peter A. Prieto, M.D., M.P.H.

Professional Background

A native of New York, Dr. Peter A. Prieto chose to dedicate his life to conquering cancer after losing his father to sarcoma. Dr. Prieto, completed his general surgery residency at Yale University School of Medicine where he took three years off and completed a surgical oncology research fellowship and a one of its kind immunotherapy fellowship in the surgery branch of the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health under the mentorship of Dr. Steven A. Rosenberg where he was co-investigator on numerous clinical trials.

He went on to complete his chief residency at Yale and then completed a two year clinical complex surgical oncology fellowship at the prestigious and consistently ranked #1 Cancer Center in the United States, University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas where he spent an additional year doing a post-doctoral research fellowship under the mentorship of Drs. Jennifer A. Wargo and Funda Meric-Bernstam. At MD Anderson Dr. Prieto was instrumental in the development and analysis of a novel phase II trial looking at neoadjuvant targeted therapy in high-risk resectable stage III BRAF mutant melanoma, which has changed the practice in this challenging patient population.

Dr. Prieto is triple board certified in complex general surgical oncology, general surgery and medical quality. As a fully trained tumor immunotherapist and surgical oncologist, he has expertise in the treatment of primary, regionally advanced and metastatic melanoma, soft tissue sarcoma and breast cancer. His research interests and laboratory investigate mechanisms of immune evasion by solid tumors to targeted and immune checkpoint blockade and prognostic markers of response to immune based therapies including adoptive cell therapy (including melanoma, sarcoma, cholangiocarcinoma and breast cancer).

Dr. Prieto serves on the Society of Surgical Oncology's Sarcoma Disease Site Workgroup Committee and is the Cancer Center Physician Liason to the American College of Surgeons Committee on Cancer.

In addition to authoring numerous high impact publications, Dr. Prieto is the recipient of several prestigious awards and honors. He frequently presents on topics related to surgical oncology and melanoma at the national and international levels. Dr. Prieto's personal mission is to treat all of his patients as if they were his own family.