Bio
Dr. Marvin Langston is an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology and Population Health. He is a member of the Stanford Cancer Institute and Urologic Cancer Epidemiology Lab. He is an epidemiologist by training who focuses on the fields of benign prostate and pelvic conditions and urological cancers including prostate and kidney cancers.
Prior to Stanford, he served as a Research Scientist in the Division of Research at Kaiser Permanente Northern California. Dr. Langston received his PhD in Epidemiology from the University of Arizona’s College of Public Health followed by postdoctoral training in Cancer Prevention and Control at Washington University in Saint Louis School of Medicine.
His program of research intends to characterize and measure infectious agents, environmental toxicants, and lifestyle factors; to evaluate the role of these factors in urological cancer etiology and outcomes; and to identify populations at high risk of exposure to these factors. So far he has focused this research to address the following questions: 1) What role do sexually transmitted infections and other systemic infections have in prostate damage and ensuing prostate cancer risk? 2) How can we appropriately model and define early life risk factors for urological cancers? 3) Can we harmonize molecular and clinical aspects of urological condition diagnoses to produce well characterized outcomes for biomarker discovery and etiological investigation? He has primarily addressed these questions using a variety of molecular and clinical epidemiology approaches while developing expertise in the cross-cutting theme of cancer health disparities with particular interests in the cancer care experiences of sexual and gender minorities and racial/ethnic minorities.
Dr. Langston has been studying the impact of exogenous factors on prostate specific antigen (PSA) concentration in young men as a marker of prostate damage and inflammation for over a decade. As early life PSA has been found predictive of future prostate cancer mortality, he has now setout to optimize risk-stratified screening for prostate cancer. This promising approach uses men’s baseline PSA values to inform their risk of future aggressive and/or fatal prostate cancer and determine their frequency of further screening. Under this approach, men with high baseline age-specific total PSA levels receive more frequent screening and men with lower levels receive less frequent screening. Dr. Langston was awarded an R01 from NCI to evaluate this approach using historically collected biospecimen. His funded research trajectory to this point also includes four training awards (2-NCI and 2-NIDDK) and several internal grants. Dr. Langston was selected in the inaugural class of the White House Cancer Moonshot Scholars for his work.
