Delphine Chen, MD

Dr. Delphine L. Chen is a nuclear medicine physician-scientist with more than 20 years of broad clinical expertise in all types of positron emission tomography (PET) and nuclear medicine molecular imaging diagnostic tests and therapy. She is particularly interested in how molecular imaging can provide information about cancer behavior and affect treatment decisions.

After graduating from the Washington University School of Medicine, Dr. Chen completed a residency in nuclear medicine at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and a fellowship in nuclear medicine at Washington University School of Medicine.

Dr. Chen was the principal investigator in the first in-human trial of PARP radiotracers to predict which patients will respond to PARP inhibitors, now shown to be highly effective in BRCA mutation-driven breast cancers. Her research seeks to expand the field of nuclear medicine and find new diagnostic imaging and therapy agents for clinical trials, including focusing on how PARP radiotracers can be used to identify additional patients who may respond to anticancer drugs. 

In 2006, she received the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation Clinical Investigator Award in support of her research into PET imaging, and in 2021, the Academy for Radiology and Biomedical Imaging Research named her a Distinguished Investigator. She has contributed to multiple publications and has more than 300 citations and is a member of the Institute for Prostate Cancer Research, a collaborative effort between Fred Hutch and UW Medicine. Dr. Chen is board-certified in nuclear medicine by the American Board of Nuclear Medicine.