Dr. Amita Patnaik is an internationally recognized Medical Oncologist and co-founder of START in San Antonio, Texas. She is the Co-Director of Clinical Research at START and is the Director of the START Fellowship program. Her clinical interests include Phase I drug development and malignancies of the breast and colorectum.

Dr. Patnaik is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Canada and a Diplomate of the American Board of Internal Medicine and Medical Oncology. Dr. Patnaik is an alumnus of the University of Toronto in Toronto, Canada where she graduated with honors and thereafter, performed her residency in Internal Medicine and fellowship in Medical Oncology. She then performed an advanced research fellowship in Anticancer-drug development at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio and subsequently spent 7 years as attending staff physician and senior clinical investigator at the Cancer Therapy and Research Center’s (CTRC) Institute for Drug Development. While at the CTRC she was also Associate Director of clinical research and Fellowship program director.

Dr. Patnaik has pioneered the development of over 20 new anticancer drugs approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration in the past 20 years, including pembrolizumab, abemaciclib and copanlisib. She is currently the principal investigator/co-investigator of over 60 early phase clinical trials of novel anticancer agents for patients with advanced cancer. She is considered to be a key opinion leader in her field and sits on the Scientific advisory boards of many innovative biotechnology companies. She has served as an advisor to the FDA and is routinely asked to speak at major international Oncology conferences. She has been a member of the Scientific program committee for the American Society of Clinical Oncology and serves as a scientific reviewer for many prestigious scientific journals. Dr. Patnaik has authored and co-authored over 90 peer-reviewed publications of original cancer research in internationally respected scientific journals including the New England Journal of Medicine, the Lancet and Cancer Discovery.

Dr. Patnaik is a member of the American Society of Clinical Oncology and the American Association for Cancer Research. She regularly mentors medical students, graduate and post-graduate students and serves as a preceptor for high school students.

Dr. Patnaik is the recipient of the San Antonio Business Journal’s prestigious “40 under 40” Award in 2001, and the Healthcare Heroes Award in 2012. She was inducted into the San Antonio women’s Hall of Fame in 2013 for her contribution to the field of science and technology. Most recently, she was recognized as a PharmaVoice 100 recipient in 2024 as a “cancer care visionary.”