Mary K. Washington, MD, PhD, FCAP
Dr. Kay Washington poses for a photo in Medical Center North at Vanderbilt University Medical Center Tuesday, March 8, 2022 in Nashville, Tennessee.
Dr. Washington has been nominated for her sustained leadership in guideline development and her contributions to advancing laboratory quality and patient care.
Through her longstanding involvement with the CAP Center Guideline Committee, Dr. Washington has played a central role in the development of evidence‑based guidelines. She led the initial multidisciplinary guideline panel for HER2 testing in gastroesophageal adenocarcinoma (GEA), and later contributed to the guideline update as an expert panel member. She continues to lead the update of the Molecular Biomarkers for the Evaluation of Colorectal Carcinomas guideline and serves on the advisory panel for the Gastroenteropancreatic Neuroendocrine Tumors (GEP‑NETs) guideline.
Dr. Washington’s work has had an equally profound influence on patient care through improved diagnostic accuracy and expanded access to targeted therapies. She played a pivotal role in the landmark 2016 guideline that established HER2 testing as essential for identifying patients with GEA who may benefit from targeted therapy. Recognizing that HER2 expression patterns, scoring criteria, and tumor heterogeneity in GEA differ significantly from breast cancer, she helped advance the development of a disease‑specific testing guidance that standardized practice and improved diagnostic accuracy worldwide. She also contributed to the recent update of this guideline, providing expert authorship and guidance on new recommendations addressing evolving testing modalities and treatment strategies. Her ongoing contributions to the forthcoming GEP‑NETs guideline are expected to further strengthen grading consistency and reporting practices essential to clinical management.
As chair of the colorectal cancer biomarker guideline update, Dr. Washington continues to lead efforts to modernize testing recommendations in a rapidly evolving precision oncology landscape.
Dr. Washington is a professor of pathology, microbiology, and immunology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee.