From inner-city Detroit to AACR president

Tell us about your career developing new cancer drugs and how that evolved?

I’ve wanted to be a medical oncologist and do drug development since I was in high school. I lost my parents to cancer when I was young and it affected me quite a bit. My mother died of a gastrointestinal stromal tumour and my father had squamous to the lung. They probably could have lived for years with what we have now but there were no drugs back then. So, I knew that we needed to develop new drugs.

I grew up in Detroit, Michigan. I was the youngest of four siblings. My parents had minimal education during their youth but wanted me to really advance in my studies from an early age. I went to a small Catholic college in the inner city of Detroit, which unfortunately closed in 2019, but it gave me a college education for free. My undergraduate focus was biology and theology, which, believe it or not, I felt were in many ways intertwined.

When I was an undergrad, I would drive down to the Michigan Cancer Foundation in downtown Detroit (now the Karmanos Cancer Institute) and work in the Carcinogenesis Lab of Drs Veronica Maher and J. Justin McCormick – literally a nun and a priest that met in the early days of their careers. When they moved to Michigan State University’s College of Osteopathic Medicine, I followed suit and went to medical school there.

After Michigan State, I did a residency in internal medicine and then a fellowship in oncology at Wayne State University, where I stayed on post-graduate training to practice oncology. My clinical mentor was Dr Rick Pazdur, now the director of the FDA Oncology Centre of Excellence. As a mentor, he was absolutely wonderful. My preclinical mentor was Dr Tom Corbett, who developed relevant syngeneic models such as Colon 26 and Colon 38, which are still used to this day. It was a perfect match in terms of mentors from the preclinical in vivo to the early-phase clinical. I just fell in love with drug development as a fellow, having those two mentors. There was no way you couldn’t fall in love with it. With my interest in drug development, and my fellowship training as my base, I began to develop the Phase 1 programme at Karmanos.

I moved to Yale about 10 years ago to help them build an early-phase clinical trials programme. Since I joined, it’s become a large clinical research programme, which I was able to develop due to having the support of the institution.

I’ve worked on a lot of drugs. There are 26 drugs I worked on that subsequently became FDA approved for various indications. I was involved with them in the early phases of their development, but I tested hundreds of drugs and compounds to get to that magic 26.

Congratulations on being elected as AACR president for 2024/25. How did that come about?

I’ve been involved in AACR for over 35 years. I would go to the AACR meetings when I was young because that’s where the new drugs were presented from a basic science perspective. I could get leads on what the drug looked like preclinically, how good it was, and then try contacting the people and sponsors to help bring the agent forward.

AACR was a great place for me when I was young because it helped build my academic career. The contacts that I made, the meetings that I went to, the focus of the AACR on promoting junior faculty – it was wonderful. I’ve been heavily involved in AACR over the years in different ways, including being on their board of directors, committee planning for the Annual Meeting and running their educational workshops.

I was both shocked and honoured when I got the phone call that I had been nominated to be president. Never in my wildest dreams would I have ever imagined that I could be president of a basic translational, and now clinical, association. We have more than 58,000 AACR member in 141 countries.

This year’s been unique. We’ve been involved in a lot of projects. We’ve also had some challenges. The National Institute of Health (NIH) recently has been challenged, with various mandates that had never been part of the process before. There are a lot of scientists, a lot of clinicians, a lot of patients and advocates that rely on the funding that comes out of the NIH and the National Cancer Institute. We’ve been working with our membership in hopes that we will have a positive impact on the outcome of some of those challenges.

It’s been a lot of work, but also a lot of fun. My co-chairs are Matt Vander Heiden, who’s the Koch Institute director at MIT, and Lillian Siu, who runs the early-phase programme at Princess Margaret Cancer Center, Toronto.

I chose Lillian before I even knew she was going to be nominated and then elected for the 2025/26 presidency of AACR. That’s very interesting because back-to-back you have two clinical trialists. There has been no precedence for this in the history of the AACR, but points to the fact that the continuum of basic translational and clinical research can’t be easily dissected anymore – they are a necessary component of each other if we’re going to take the basic science and make it as meaningful as possible, which means translating into positive outcomes for patients.

When my parents died, cancer became my enemy at a very young age, and I realised that we needed to fight this war. Organisations like AACR help bring the scientists of all disciplines together because no war was ever won with one soldier. Independent discoveries are very important, but team science is essential.

Speaking of the AACR Annual Meeting this year, what are you most excited about and what breakthroughs do you think we’ll see?

I’m not privy to all the abstracts yet, but some of the major symposia and plenary sessions are focused on some groundbreaking novel concepts in science. We’re going to hear a lot about metabolomics. I think GLP-1 agonists are going to be very important in oncology in the future and we should hear about that. We’ll hear about what a more personalised approach to cancer treatment looks like.

My presidential symposium is on global oncology. We have representatives from many different parts of the globe talking about the challenges and their needs. Collectively, I believe that studying and treating oncology across the globe, especially in low- and middle-income countries, is not only important because it’s the right thing to do, but also because many of these communities in geographical areas have more homogeneous populations and the data obtained from their diagnoses and treatments is essential to the better understanding and outcomes for all with cancer in the future.

We need multiple different communities coming together to help understand the biology of the disease. Why are there some communities in Africa, for example, where MSI-high colon cancer represents a much greater percentage of their colorectal cancer population than that in Caucasian populations, or an overabundance of BRCA mutations in patients with certain cancers? How does that biology translate to other patients? Bringing it together will help us understand the disease better and inform us on what novel therapeutics we need.

We’ve got phenomenal topics. It’s going to be a very exciting meeting. I’m hoping it’s going to be the best.

You are chair of the Cancer Research UK’s New Agents Committee. Tell us about your role and why you chose to do it.

I’ve been the chair of Cancer Research UK’s New Agents Committee for about five years. It’s very exciting. First of all, the committee members are phenomenal. You’ve got experts, many from other countries of the world, with unique disciplines, and if something comes up where you need an expert in a discipline that is not represented, you bring someone on.

The committee decides whether these novel agents are ready to go into early-phase clinical trials, or whether they need to go back to the drawing board. It’s a unique opportunity, not only for me – I probably learn more than I contribute – but also for these respective investigators and small biotech companies that have a novel agent they want to develop.

Not only is the committee enriched with expertise, but if a concept is taken forward, you have the expertise of your investigators from the UK and now other parts of Europe that will take this drug into the most relevant type of clinical trial.

Some of your trials looking at rare diseases have been interesting, like DETERMINE, where you’re repurposing existing drugs for new indications. That to me is important because often we just forget about the drugs once they’re approved for specific indications. And it’s not common that you would be able to bring paediatric patients into a clinical trial with adult patients. That’s quite unique.

In terms of drug development, any tips for researchers?

I highly encourage people to explore partnering with the Centre for Drug Development. You will reap the benefits of the expertise on the New Agents Committee, which I feel is not as well-known as it should be and is not taken advantage of as much as it could. The committee can help investigators and biotechs develop drugs that can make a difference for patients. That’s what we’re focused on, developing drugs that make a difference for our patients. I think they will be pleasantly surprised.

This story was first published on Cancer News.