Dr. Ramon Velasquez Tiu, MD

Ramon Tiu is an Assistant Professor of Molecular Medicine at Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University and is associate staff in the Department of Translational Hematology and Oncology Research and Department of Hematologic Oncology and Blood Disorders at Cleveland Clinic. He completed his medical school training at the University of Santo Tomas Faculty of Medicine and Surgery in the Philippines and subsequently pursued internal medicine training at Cleveland Clinic from 2003-2006. He pursued further research training in experimental hematology as a bone marrow failure research fellow at Cleveland Clinic under the tutelage of Dr. Jaroslaw P. Maciejewski, which he continued throughout his fellowship training in hematology and oncology at the same institution. He is well published in the area of single nucleotide polymorphism arrays, especially in their clinical application in myeloid malignancies like myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) and acute …myeloid leukemia (AML). He is a young investigator awardee from the MDS Foundation and the Aplastic Anemia and MDS International Foundation and a prior recipient of a T32 research award from Case Western Reserve University. He is involved in both clinical and translational research, focusing mainly on the field of myeloproliferative neoplasms and bone marrow failure syndromes. His laboratory research team recently identified a gene called SF3B1 to be frequently mutated in cases of MDS with ring sideroblasts, specifically refractory anemia with ring sideroblasts (RARS) and RARS associated with marked thrombocytosis (RARS-T). SF3B1 is a gene involved in an important physiologic post-transcriptional process called splicing. This is an unprecedented finding, as this is the first time that the spliceosome machinery has been implicated as a possible cause in blood cancers, particularly in MDS. Recently, his research team showed the first experimental evidence linking SF3B1 dysfunction and the formation of ring sideroblast in MDS. He is also very active in conducting clinical trials in bone marrow failure syndromes and myeloproliferative neoplasms (MPNs) and an active clinician seeing patients with MDS, MDS/MPN overlap syndromes, MPNs and rare bone marrow failure conditions like Aplastic Anemia, PNH and LGL leukemia. He is board certified in Internal Medicine, Hematology and Oncology.