Trace the remarkable growth and development of medical oncology at Dana-Farber — from its early roots to today's mission-driven commitment to excellence in research, care, collaboration, and training.
Keywords: 75th Anniversary
so many of our faculty have spent so many years here in many cases their entire career. So there is an enormous history within the department. There is an enormous wealth of knowledge about cancer, about cancer therapy, about cancer biology, about the organization of the department and the institute. It is a constant source of advice and guidance for me and for many faculty members, the farmer grew as oncology itself group in the country. I was clinical director of the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda and when I came we had only about four senior doctors and that was all. When I came to Dana Farber in 1977. Medical oncology was a division. It was a division and a bunch of clinicians and there was one breast cancer doc and one lung cancer doc and one G you doc. So there were about seven or eight docks when I came at that time there was some new drugs with which patients could be cured. So I said, what we have to do is write these up, get published and then send the reprints to whoever sent us the patients and that's what we did. And sometimes we put their names on the paper as co authors and to please them. And then the word got out and we and we build up rather a large practice What we have seen in the last 25 years. No one could have predicted why did it happen? Science? There was a very famous grant written in 1973 by email Friday. The third we took over that grant but we realized that we couldn't be anything unless we developed many grants within five years we had written grants on lymphoma. AmL A. L. L. Bone marrow transplant. We published like crazy and we attracted very bright, very talented fellows, many of whom stayed on and became really quite good scientists as well as clinicians. In 1979 I was a clinical fellow. It was and still is the best medical oncology and hematology fellowship program in the country are fellowship program is absolutely our crown jewel, whether it is wet lab, dry lab or clinical research training. We have such amazing mentors here and bob mayor really stands above all. He trained generation after generation of fellows, bob is unbelievably respected by the history of the fellows. He's a great trainer, he's an extraordinary doctor and the case took over from bob mayor a few years ago to run the fellowship. She's just done a terrific job. In 1980, Dr. Baruch Vanessa Rev became president of Dana Farber. Then he gets the Nobel prize and suddenly we're in all the newspapers, all the magazines The 1980s were crucial to our growth in numbers of patients recognition And growth of our faculty in 1993 Jim Griffin and I were new full professors and we started the division of him. It'll logic malignancies. We started it on the principle that the people who would work there had to be committed to taking care of patients and doing science. So who did we take? We took my first postdoc ken Anderson, we took Margaret ship. We took rob cipher with us. We took barney Friedman and on and on. So those people have been here with us one family For 25 years. The decision was made to establish a department of medical oncology. I became chair and I tried to figure out what will we build. I said, we're going to build a metal logic malignancies in every disease. I asked the scientists, Bill calin Baratheon find me the smartest young scientists in the country and they found Matt Myerson, they found nellie Pollack and David Nathan. He gave me a free reign and we had a brand new building, the smith building and it was empty and we developed a culture that being a doctor and seeing patients and caring for them. It was really important. And now suddenly we'd hire somebody like eric Weiner and when I hired him the most unbelievable thing. Every one of his patients that he cared for. A Duke got on airplanes and came here everybody. The whole do practice moved up here. These are real doctors and they were interested in training real doctors And suddenly Dana Farber had a culture. We're going to be the best doctors also. I think when I started his chair, there was somewhere around 125 or so faculty in medical oncology and by the time I left there was about 250. We put in a huge effort to start recruiting basic and applied immunologists. It was also clear that we could start to identify all of the mutations in a cancer patient's tumor. There was an intense need to understand cancer not just at an individual level but at a population level. The division of Population sciences had been set up under jane weeks and jane weeks had a tremendous vision for where that kind of research could go. And she said about recruiting just some wonderful colleagues including Dub Track who's the current division chief. As the department grew it had increased opportunities to collaborate with other institutions and there's certainly one I'd like to bring up is particularly important and that is the broad institute. The broad institute was set up as a technical institute that would take advantage of the ability to sequence DNA from patients with all kinds of different diseases. Investigators very quickly took advantage of the opportunity to scale up their research by interacting with the broad scientists. This is an extraordinarily collaborative environment. We have the Harvard School of Public Health, we have Harvard Medical School Brigham and Women's Hospital, all of the institutions that are part of the Dana Farber Harvard Cancer Center and that is enormously enabling of our research. We have all of the people that you need to really make enormous progress in cancer care. We have basic scientists who think like clinicians, we have clinicians who think like basic scientists, all of whom have a combination of clinical and scientific training research often leads in unexpected directions. Dr Killen typifies Dana Farber's model of bench to bedside science. He's a model of excellence. As a physician scientist, He was an oncology fellow here in the 1980s who stayed here for his entire career. His science was inspired by clinical observations of the von Hippel Lindau Syndrome and his discoveries have implications for the development of new therapies for cancer. In 2019 39 years after Dr. John Assaraf was awarded the Nobel Prize, Dr Colin was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine for his groundbreaking work in the mechanism of oxygen sensors. This type of basic science with clinical application distinguishes Dana Farber and the Department of Medical oncology. We are all inspired by the work of Dr Callen and the next generation of research challenges in the fight against cancer. Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, mm hmm.
