E-Newsletter - December 2016

Meet nEw alliance leadership 

Group Statistician | Sumithra J. Mandrekar, PhD, has been elected by our Board of Directors to serve as the Group Statistician. Dr. Mandrekar is a Professor of Biostatistics and Oncology at the Mayo Clinic.  For the Mayo Clinic Cancer Center, she has been the Associate Director of Biostatistics, and is currently the Section Head of the Cancer Center Statistics. Dr. Mandrekar was the Group Statistician for the North Central Cancer Treatment Group prior to the merger that created the Alliance, and subsequently was the founding director of the statistics unit, and has been an essential contributor to Alliance research as the co-lead and lead for the Respiratory and Leukemia Committees, respectively. 

Dr. Mandrekar is a highly accomplished senior biostatistician at the Mayo Clinic, and has authored more than 120 peer reviewed publications.  She is involved in important international partnerships to develop new clinical trial endpoints, and her particular interests are in developing innovative clinical trials designs to meet the challenge of precision medicine.

Prevention Committee Co-Chairs | Isabelle Bedrosian, MD and Marie E. Wood, MD, have been appointed Co-Chairs of the Alliance Prevention Committee. They will work to advance the committee's mission to prevent or reduce the impact of cancer by engaging a broad community of scientists and clinicians from many disciplines, who are committed to discovering, validating, and disseminating effective strategies for the risk assessment, early detection/screening, and intervention.

Dr.Bedrosian is an Associate Professor in the Department of Surgical Oncology in the Division of Surgery at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and Medical Director of the Nellie B. Connally Breast Center at UT-MDACC.  Dr. Wood is a Professor of Medicine and Director of the Familial Cancer Program at the University of Vermont. Drs. Bedrosian and Wood succeed James R. Marshall, MD (Roswell Park Cancer Institute), who served as the Chair of the Alliance Prevention Committee for five years.

Community Oncology Committee Co-Chairs | Daniel M. Anderson, MD and Margaret Kemeny, MD, have been appointed Co-Chairs of the Alliance Community Oncology Committee. Dr. Anderson is the Principal Investigator at the Metro Minnesota NCORP in St. Louis Park, MN. He is currently working on projects investigating the effectiveness of current therapies in treating patients with advanced cancers. Dr. Kemeny is Director of Queens Hospital Center  in Jamaica, NY. She is a world-renowned surgical oncologist and a leading clinical researcher and pioneer in the field of intrahepatic infusion therapy for liver tumors. Both succeed Robert Behren, MD (Cancer Center of Iowa), who served as the Co-Chair of the Alliance Community Oncology Committee for five years.

Experimental Therapeutics and Rare Tumor Committee Co-Chair | Pamela Munster, MD, has been appointed Co-Chair of the Alliance Experimental Therapeutics and Rare Tumor Committee. Dr. Munster is a Professor in the Department of Medicine (Hematology/Oncology) at the University of California San Francisco; Director of the Early Phase Clinical Trials Unit and Leader of the Developmental Therapeutics Program at the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center. Her clinical research interests are first-in-human early phase clinical trials of novel compounds and alternative strategies for the treatment and prevention of cancer. She succeeds Charles Erlichman, MD (Mayo-Rochester), who served as the Co-Chair of the Alliance Experimental Therapetics Committee.

Breast Committee Correlative Science Co-Chairs | Ian E. Krop, MD, PhD, and Charles Perou, PhD, have been appointed Co-Chairs of the Alliance Breast Cancer Correlative Science Committee. Dr. Krop is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and an Instructor in Medicine (Adult Oncology) at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. His research goal is to identify novel predictive markers and therapeutic targets in breast cancer and translate these discoveries into clinically useful reagents. Dr. Perou is the May Goldman Shaw Distinguished Professor of Molecular Oncology and Professor of Genetics in Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. One of his  major contribution is in the characterization of the diversity of breast tumors, which resulted in the discovery of the Basal-like/Triple-Negative Breast Cancer subtype. Perou's research crosses the disciplines of genomics, cancer biology, bioinformatics, epidemiology, and clinical trials. 

 

For other articles in the December issue of the Alliance E-News newsletter, see below.