National Cancer Institute (NIH)
The NCI is the US government's cancer research agency, spending ~$7B a year and running the Cancer Centers Program, TCGA, and Rosenberg's cell therapy lab.
Funds the 74 NCI-designated centres, ran TCGA and the RAS Initiative, runs SEER and ClinicalTrials-linked cooperative groups (NRG, SWOG, Alliance, ECOG-ACRIN), and the Surgery Branch (Rosenberg: TIL, neoantigen TCR-T).
- Cancer Centers Program (74 centres)
- TCGA / GDC
- Cooperative groups
- Surgery Branch cell therapy
Invented BH3 profiling, the functional test behind venetoclax's success, before becoming NCI director.
Led the selumetinib trials that gave children with neurofibromatosis their first approved drug.
Co-developed the HPV vaccine technology that is eliminating cervical cancer in vaccinated populations.
With Emil Freireich he showed that combinations of drugs could cure childhood leukaemia, then extended the idea to Hodgkin lymphoma and to adjuvant treatment after surgery.
At the NCI in the early 1960s he and Emil Frei gave children four drugs at once, VAMP, against fierce opposition, and turned a uniformly fatal leukaemia into a curable one. He also worked out platelet transfusion.
A lawyer treated for breast cancer in 1987 who built the National Breast Cancer Coalition and won the Department of Defense breast cancer programme, the first to put trained patient advocates on scientific review panels.
RAS biologist who founded Onyx Pharmaceuticals and led the NCI's national effort to drug RAS.
Runs NCI's immuno-oncology clinical programme, from prostate cancer vaccines to bifunctional checkpoint fusion proteins.
Louis Staudt defined the molecular subtypes of large B-cell lymphoma that guide targeted therapy.
She turned the American Cancer Society into a research funder in the 1940s, built the Lasker Awards, and led the lobbying that produced the 1971 National Cancer Act and the modern NCI budget.
Nirali Shah developed CD22 CAR-T for children whose leukaemia escaped CD19 therapy.
Made mesothelin a drug target, from immunotoxins to ADCs and CAR-T, and leads NCI's mesothelioma programme.
Diagnosed in 1974, she refused the standard practice of biopsy and mastectomy under one anaesthetic without the patient's say. Her campaign made the two-step procedure and informed choice the norm.
Father of cancer immunotherapy: first to cure patients with IL-2 and with their own tumour-infiltrating lymphocytes.
Lifileucel proved that Steven Rosenberg's decades-old TIL concept could be industrialised into a licensed product and gave patients with checkpoint-refractory melanoma, who otherwise have few options, a chance of durable remission. It is the first cell therapy approved for any solid tumour. The treatment requires surgery to harvest tumour, hospitalisation for lymphodepletion and IL-2, and specialised centres, so its reach is limited.
Cancers are defined as much by the tissue they come from as by the mutations they carry, which is why the same drug can work in one organ and fail in another with the same mutation. TCGA is the shared public dataset behind most modern biomarkers and target discovery.
For people with a heavy smoking history, an annual low-dose CT scan is one of the few screening tests proven to reduce cancer deaths. Most abnormal scans are not cancer, so screening must be paired with careful nodule management. It does not apply to never-smokers or light smokers.
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