The Cancer History Project Cancer History Project

In this episode, 2024 David Karnofsky Memorial Award winner Lillian L. Siu reviews her career developing novel therapies in the phase I setting, the evolution of her field, and her mentor’s dreaded “evil red pencil.”

Siu was among the first scientists to read out the signals of safety, pharmacology, and preliminary efficacy of therapeutic agents that ushered in a new era of cancer therapy. She has been involved in the early development of over 50 drugs and has focused on ways to improve efficiency and scientific relevance of clinical trials.

Over the course of her career as a phase I clinical trialist, Siu watched as the field moved away from using “maximum tolerated dose,” the growing need for early-phase efficacy data, and the emergence of intermediate biomarkers.

After a nearly 30-year-long career, Siu’s advice for young oncologists is simple: Don’t give up.

“Learn from every mistake or every challenge and rise above it and be tenacious,” Siu said. “Be persistent, because there’s never an end that is a bad ending. It is always a good ending if you put enough effort in it. Maybe not entirely the way you want it, but at least if you put in the effort, something will return to you that is worth your effort. I truly believe in that, and certainly I see that in my career.

“I don’t only have positive results, I have very often negative results, but it’s fun. Learning from your mistakes is half of the fun, and cherish that kind of moment to learn from it.”

Siu spoke with Jacquelyn Cobb, reporter with The Cancer Letter. A transcript of the conversation appears on The Cancer History Project.

Something felt wrong during one of Morhaf Al Achkar’s regular runs on the treadmill in late 2016. He started gasping for breath.

“It became really hard to run,” he said. “That sudden development of shortness of breath alarmed me.”

Being a family physician in Indiana at the time, he asked a resident at the clinic where he worked to listen to his lungs. “There’s no air moving on the left side of your chest—that doesn’t seem right,” Al Achkar recalled hearing from the resident.

A few weeks later, Al Achkar received devastating news: he had stage 4 ALK-positive lung cancer. He estimated that he would live for just another six to 10 months.

But today—nearly eight years after his devastating diagnosis—Al Achkar is still working, now primarily as a researcher and educator.

Al Achkar spoke with Deborah Doroshow, assistant professor of medicine, hematology, and medical oncology at the Tisch Cancer Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

A transcript of this conversation is available on the Cancer History Project.

When Stephanie Graff was a breast oncology fellow in 2010, one of her patients brought a marked up copy of “Dr. Susan Love’s Breast Book” to an appointment.

“One of my patients had brought it in and was using it almost as her cancer notebook, and had pages flagged and said, ’Well, what about this? What about this? It says here…,’” Graff, director of Breast Oncology at Lifespan Cancer Institute and medical advisor for the Dr. Susan Love Foundation for Breast Cancer Research, said to The Cancer Letter.

It was the first time that the book, written by Susan Love, a breast cancer surgeon, activist, and founder of the Dr. Susan Love Foundation for Breast Cancer Research, had shown up on Graff’s radar.

“Dr. Susan Love’s Breast Book” was first published in 1990. Now, Graff is a contributing author of the seventh edition, the most recent version of the book published in 2023.

Graff spoke with Alexandria Carolan, associate editor of the Cancer History Project. A full transcript of this conversation, including how Graff came to know and work with Susan Love, appears on the Cancer History Project.

Soon after he was diagnosed with a dedifferentiated liposarcoma, C. Norman Coleman reached out to The Cancer Letter and the Cancer History Project to initiate a series of interviews about his life and career.

The plan was to keep going for as long as possible. Alas, only one interview–about an hour’s worth–got done. Coleman spoke with Otis Brawley and Paul Goldberg, co-editors of the Cancer History Project.

Coleman died March 1 at 79.

At NCI, Coleman was the associate director of the Radiation Research Program, senior investigator in the Radiation Oncology Branch in the Center for Cancer Research, and leader of a research laboratory at NIH. He was also the founder of the International Cancer Expert Corps, a non-profit he created to provide mentorship to cancer professionals in low- and middle-income countries and in regions with indigenous populations in upper-income countries.

This interview is available as a transcript on the Cancer History Project.

In this conversation, Vivian Pinn speaks with Robert Winn, guest editor of The Cancer Letter and the Cancer History Project during Black History Month, about the obstacles she faced as a medical student, how she incidentally helped integrate restaurants in Charlottesville in the 1960s, and her beginnings as a Research Fellow in Immunopathology at NIH.

Pinn was the only African American and the only woman in her class to graduate from the University of Virginia School of Medicine in 1967. In 1982, she was the first African American woman to chair an academic pathology department in the United States, at Howard University College of Medicine.

She went on to become the first full-time director of the Office of Research on Women’s Health at NIH in 1991.

In this conversation, Roderick Pettigrew speaks with Robert Winn, guest editor of The Cancer Letter and the Cancer History Project during Black History Month, about Pettigrew’s contributions to research, how he became an early self-taught expert on Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging, or the MRI, as well as when he became founding director of National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering.

Pettigrew is chief executive officer of Engineering Health (EnHealth) and inaugural dean for Engineering Medicine (EnMed) at Texas A&M University in partnership with Houston Methodist Hospital, and the Endowed Robert A. Welch Chair in Medicine and founding director of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering. Winn is the director and Lipman Chair in Oncology at VCU Massey Comprehensive Cancer Center, and senior associate dean for cancer innovation and professor of pulmonary disease and critical care medicine at VCU School of Medicine.