
Mark Heaney, M.D., Ph.D.
Mark Heaney received his undergraduate education at Harvard and graduate education at the University of Virginia where he received an M.D. and a Ph.D. in microbiology. After Internal Medicine residency at SUNY Stony Brook, he had fellowship training in Hematology and Medical Oncology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Dr. Heaney subsequently joined the faculty at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. As a member of the Leukemia Service for nearly 20 years, Dr. Heaney continued laboratory research, initially studying the cell surface receptors that govern white blood cell development and leukemia cell growth. More recently, he has focused on metabolic differences between leukemia cells and normal cells that can provide insight into how leukemias behave in the individual patient and how they respond to treatment. His finding that vitamin C has the potential to blunt the beneficial effects of chemotherapy has been widely cited. Dr. Heaney joined the faculty at Columbia Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons in January, 2013 where he is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Columbia University Medical Center. He has been the Principal Investigator of many clinical trials with a particular interest in myeloproliferative neoplasms, including myelofibrosis, polycythemia vera, essential thrombocythemia, and chronic myelogenous leukemia. Dr. Heaney also has expertise in several rare hematologic malignancies, including hairy cell leukemia, large granular lymphocyte leukemia, hypereosinophilic syndromes, mastocytosis and histiocytic diseases. He is on the Medical Advisory Boards of the Mast Cell Disease Society and the Erdheim-Chester Global Alliance. He has been a long-time medical educator, formerly serving as the Co-Director of the Medical Oncology and Hematology Fellowship Program at MSKCC and was named Director of the Hematology and Medical Oncology Fellowship Program at CUMC in 2014. Dr. Heaney also has considerable experience regulatory aspects of drug development as the Chair of the Herbert Irving Cancer Center Institutional Review Board at Columbia since 2015.