Jane Cooke Wright

Jane Cooke Wright (1919-2013) joined her father Louis Wright's Cancer Research Foundation at Harlem Hospital in 1949 and became its director in 1952. At a time when chemotherapy was regarded as a last resort for leukaemia, she showed that methotrexate produced responses in breast cancer, mycosis fungoides and other solid tumours, and pioneered testing candidate drugs against a patient's own tumour cells in culture to guide treatment, an idea now returning as functional precision medicine. She developed regional perfusion of chemotherapy for hard-to-reach tumours. In 1964 she was the only woman and the only African American among the seven founders of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, and in 1967 became associate dean of New York Medical College, then the highest post held by a Black woman at a US medical school. She served on the President's Commission on Heart Disease, Cancer and Stroke.