Afreen Shariff, MD

Dr. Afreen Shariff is an Endocrinologist, the Co-founder of Citrus Oncology and an Associate Professor of Medicine at the Duke University School of Medicine. Her clinical and research focus is in improving care for endocrine disorders in cancer patients.

She has a profound commitment to enhancing healthcare delivery and equity through value-based, patient-centric clinical and educational programs targeted at improving access and reducing health costs while managing complex oncology patients effectively.

With the mission to provide cancer warriors with incident and existing side effects from cancer drugs, the highest quality care through innovation, collaboration and compassion, Dr. Shariff has created and led several successful initiatives over the years. A few of these include, the Duke Endo Oncology Telehealth platform, Duke Onco Endocrinology Program, Cancer Therapy Toxicity Program, producing and hosting a medical podcast series - Checkpoint NOW, founding the Onco-Endocrinology Special Interest Group (SIG) through The Endocrine Society and creating a novel AI model to effectively predict hospitalizations from immunotherapy related adverse events up to 2 weeks in advance of the expected event.

Timely access, patient-provider-subspecialist education, care navigation and predicting and preventing hospital admissions from toxicities using AI powered clinical decision tools has been the focus of her career.

Dr. Shariff has served in advisory roles for AI driven health-tech start ups, non-profits, medical therapeutic/device companies, remote patient monitoring in oncology and endocrinology.

Dr. Shariff is the host and producer for the widely popular medical podcast series Checkpoint NOW.

She has served as the chair for multiple CME meetings, speaks internationally on topics related to cancer side effects, AI in healthcare, diabetes in cancer, co-ordinated care in cancer, co-morbidities and toxicities from cancer treatments and care continuum in the survivorship phase.

Dr. Shariff is actively engaged as a consultant for pharma, health-tech startups, medical education and online content development.

She has launched award winning programs and the Co-founder for Citrus Oncology- an AI supported multi-specialty virtual cancer support clinic.

Dr. Shariff has over 10 years of experience training physicians (oncologists and endocrinologists), medical students, researchers in the field of Onco Endocrinology (Intersection of Endocrine disease and cancer).

She is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Duke where she has developed the first Onco Endocrinology fellowship training track.

She is passionate about bridging the knowledge gap in our training programs and also trains international scholars to develop leadership skills.

Dr. Shariff believes strongly in amplifying and supporting patient and caregiver voices.

She works closely with advocacy groups like Danny’s Dose, Adrenal insufficiency United, Lets Win Foundation to develop content and programming.