Dr. Innocenti is Associate Professor in the Division of Pharmacotherapy and Experimental Therapeutics of the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill. He is the first Associate Director for Oncology Research in the Institute for Pharmacogenomics and Individualized Therapy. He holds appointments in the UNC School of Medicine and the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. Dr. Innocenti obtained his MD from the University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy, followed by residencies in Clinical Pharmacology and Oncology. He has a PhD in Pharmacology, Toxicology, and Chemotherapy from the same institution.

He joined the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in January 2011 after twelve years of research in cancer pharmacogenetics at the University of Chicago. At the same institution, he directed the Pharmacology Course for the Pritzker School of Medicine for the seven years. Dr. Innocenti is the principal investigator of numerous pharmacogenetic studies within the Alliance of Clinical Trials in Oncology (previously Cancer and Leukemia Group B), where he serves as the Chair of the Gastrointestinal Solid Tumor Correlative Science Group. He is the Chair of the Oncology Section at the American Society of Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics. He has published more than eighty peer-reviewed publications and book chapters in clinical pharmacology and pharmacogenomics, and he is the editor of three books in the field of pharmacogenomics. Dr. Innocenti sits on the editorial board of Journal of Clinical Oncology, Pharmacogenetics and Genomics, Therapeutic Drug Monitoring, Current Drug Metabolism, and others. He is the Associate Editor for Pharmacogenomics. He has organized the Golden Helix Symposia® on genomics and translational medicine in 2009, 2010, and 2012. One of Dr. Innocenti’s exemplary achievements is the elucidation of the genetic basis of severe neutropenia in cancer patients treated with irinotecan, a poster child for pharmacogenetic. According to these results, the label of irinotecan was revised in 2005. Dr. Innocenti is a co-inventor of the FDA-approved UGT1A1 genetic test for patients treated with irinotecan. Dr. Innocenti’s NIH-funded research program is currently focused on the discovery of genomic determinants of efficacy and toxicity of cancer chemotherapy, integrating clinical genomic investigation with functional evaluation of gene variation.