Professor
The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center
O. Hans Iwenofu, MD is a Professor in the Anatomic Pathology Branch and a faculty member of the Division of Bone and Soft Tissue. Dr. Iwenofu earned his MBBS at the College of Medicine, University of Nigeria in Enugu, Nigeria. He started his residency at the University College Hospital Ibadan, Nigeria, before coming to the United States where he completed his residency training in Anatomic and Clinical Pathology at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center in Oklahoma City. Dr. Iwenofu then went on to complete a fellowship in Oncologic Surgical Pathology at Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York followed by a fellowship in Soft Tissue/Bone Pathology at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
Dr. Iwenofu’s research interest is focused on understanding the underpinnings of sarcomagenesis, biomarker discovery and personalized medicine as it applies to soft issue and bone tumors. In a collaborative seminal study titled: “miR-29 acts as a decoy in sarcomas to protect the tumor suppressor A20 mRNA from degradation by HuR” they discovered a unique regulatory circuitry of the decoy function of miR-29 on HuR in the regulation of A20 tumor suppressor activity. This finding uncovers a completely new role of the microRNA-29 besides its tumor suppressor function and provides insightful clues as to why NF-kB is constitutively elevated in different sarcoma subtypes thus maintaining cells in a perpetual primitive state.
He has published many papers focused on clinical and translational aspects of soft tissue and bone bones and serves on the editorial boards of Human Pathology, Journal of Surgical Oncology and BMC