
Chapter 14: Global Academic Programs: Activities and Services Offered to Partners
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Description
In this Chapter, Dr. Bogler talks about several services GAP offers to bring faculty together with partner institutions.
He first describes the annual conference that brings faculty and international partners together. He talks about unique features of the conference. Then he discusses a conference held in Oslo early in Dr. Ronald DePinho’s presidency: Dr. Bogler explains how it helped demonstrate the “power of the GAP network”.
Dr. Bogler underscores that Dr. DePinho has a strong vision of international collaboration and translation of research.
Next, Dr. Bogler explains what MD Anderson derives from partnerships. He gives an example of the partnership with the National Cancer Institute of Mexico, which is working on a Federal program of smoking cessation.
Identifier
BoglerO_02_20141117_C014
Publication Date
11-11-2014
Publisher
The Historical Resources Center, Research Medical Library, The University of Texas Cancer Center
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
Oliver Bogler, PhD, Oral History Interview, November 17, 2014
Topics Covered
An Institutional Unit; MD Anderson Impact; Institutional Processes; Research, Care, and Education; Institutional Mission and Values; The MD Anderson Brand, Reputation; Beyond the Institution; Understanding the Institution; MD Anderson and Government; Global Issues –Cancer, Health, Medicine
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Disciplines
History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Oncology | Oral History
Transcript
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
0:06:40 Can you give me an example of a really successful relationship that you’ve established, how it started and then how it evolved, I mean, talking along the way maybe about the kinds of services that GAP offers?
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
0:06:52 Sure. So I’ll answer that question in a slightly different way in the sense that I don’t really think of any of these relationships as ones that I’ve established personally. I’ve been part of the GAP team when a good number of the more recent ones have joined, and some of those are very successful. Others were in existence when I came into the team. I think regardless of which it is, and this is sort of a truism I think that we know from our personal lives, a relationship is not something that you form and then it exists forever. It’s something you have to keep renewing and refreshing, and particularly these academic collaborations, you know, leadership changes at either institution, or even key faculty champions at Anderson may retire or separate. So you’re continually rebuilding the relationships from scratch. We have some really excellent examples of longstanding successes. I’ll give you one that’s near and dear to my heart, which is the DKFZ, that stands for the Deutsches Krebs Forschungs Zentrum, the German Cancer Center. So this is the dominant Cancer Center in Germany in Heidelberg. It’s associated with the University of Heidelberg, but it’s a freestanding research center originally and now also has a center called the—what’s it called? I’m going to embarrass myself here. It’s the Center for Tumor Treatment, which is the—what do they call it? I can’t think of the acronym right now.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
0:08:33 We can always put it in later.
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
0:08:35 Yeah, I’ll put that in later. It’s embarrassing. But they have a heavy-ion therapy center, so they’ve got a lot of commonalities with them. And their leadership is very—they’ve got a very strong leadership. Dr. Wiesler is the president of the DKFZ right now. He happens to be a brain tumor pathologist. I’ve known him through my research work for a while. But he’s a really good leader, and he’s very interested in the connection to MD Anderson, so we’ve had a strong relationship during Dr. Mendelsohn’s time, also during Dr. DePinho’s time. So here are some of the services that we provide. We hold regular conferences, symposia with them. Just a few weeks back, Dr. DePinho and about a half a dozen of our faculty traveled to Heidelberg and they joined in a symposium there that was focused on brain tumors, on immunology, on some high-throughput or big-data genomics and a couple of other areas that are of common interest. And that’s a very common thing for us to do. We do conferences like that with many of our partners in different sort of combinations. We do, for example, a rotating conference in China, which we call the Sino-U.S. Conference, and we have five partners in China, and the conference rotates sort of on an annual basis between these five partnerships. With each partner, each year we pick a particular theme that’s of mutual interest, we bring some faculty and then members from our other Chinese partners sort of congregate and there’s a symposium. So that’s a very common activity.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
0:10:11 So how does GAP step in in developing a relationship like that and provide support so those kinds of events can come about, and what emerges from them?
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
0:10:22 Yes, that’s a really good question. You know, initially, typically, when the connections are made, there’s a point-to-point connection. And I’ll give you another example. This is actually a relationship that was formed during my time in GAP, which is with the Instituto de Cancerologia, which is part of a nonprofit private hospital group in Medellin in Colombia, called Las Clinicas, I think Las Clinicas Americas. So there was a great collaboration between a couple of our gynecological surgeons, Dr. Schmeler and Ramirez, and they were working on a very interesting clinical trial that compared different surgical approaches to cervical cancer, and the focus was on late-stage cervical cancer, something we don’t see a lot in the United States. We some of it, but not so much. So they were having trouble, frankly, accruing to this, and they had a network and a different international network with several centers in it, but when they connected with this center, I think through professional circles, they connected with the surgeons there, they went down and credentialed them. They were really impressed. This group joined the trial, and they started accruing very well, and the trial really caught fire, so—
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
0:11:44 I’m sorry. When you say “accruing,” you mean they had difficulty attracting patients to participate?
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
0:11:48 Just finding patients that met their clinical needs.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
0:11:50 I see.
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
0:11:50 Because here in the United States, we have a pretty good coverage of screening for cervical cancer, so most women are caught much earlier and are not candidates for surgery of this kind. So you do, in some underserved areas, you do find some more aggressive kinds of cervical cancer, but in other countries and in low- and middle-income countries, you see a higher incidence of aggressive cancers because there’s much less screening. So just in their daily practice, the surgeons in Medellin were more commonly seeing women with late-stage cervical cancer. So there was just a bigger population. But the issue with the surgical trial is that you have to really credential the surgeons. You have to make sure that they’re doing the surgery in a consistent manner and in a high-quality manner, because it’s not perhaps like a drug trial where how you inject the drug on a technical level is neither that difficult nor is it that variable, right? You either inject it or you don’t. But surgery, that’s a very different thing. So this was really a—it built a high level of trust because our surgeons traveled there several times and they met in conferences. I think their surgeons came here, and they really very quickly gained, I think, strong trust in the quality of medicine that’s been practiced at this institution. So they came, Kathleen and Pedro came knocking—that’s Dr. Schmeler and Dr. Ramirez—came knocking on our door at GAP and said, “Hey, this is a great center. You should take a look.” So I went down with Hilario, one of my team members, and we visited, and that’s how the process starts. So there’s usually reciprocal visits. We had delegations going back and forth. Of course, when we visited, we told them about MD Anderson and we learned about their hospital. And then we have a formal process on the way to sister institution status, which is that we have an oversight committee and we present the relationship twice. We do what we call a pre-presentation, which is a fairly brief presentation with maybe a half a dozen slides or so, some core facts about the institution, some indications of their capabilities. So we usually talk about some fundamental hospital metrics, case numbers, research, infrastructure, this kind of thing, governance and so on. And we kind of just sort of do this pre-presentation to essentially raise it up to our committee and say, “Hey, this is something we’re thinking about.” This is an opportunity for people to raise concerns or indicate interest, and as we’re building the relationship, we kind of give the institution a heads-up. Then as things progress, usually sometime in the next six to twelve months, we will then come back for a full formal presentation, which takes more like a half an hour and really goes into some depth. During that exploratory period, we look at and we consider the—we have a set of metrics—“metrics” might be overstating it, but set of criteria is a better way of saying it, that we consider when we think about this institution. We look at, for example, its infrastructure. Is it a good program? Is it a significant program? Some of our partners are entirely cancer-focused like we are. Other are Cancer Centers in universities or are just big hospitals with cancer programs. So it varies. We look particularly closely at the cancer part of the equation. We look at their status in their environment. Are they one of the major or even the dominant cancer player in their environment? Are they seeing the dominant patients? What kind of research capabilities do they have? We look at the strategic opportunities that the institution might offer us. By partnering with this institution, do we gain access to a particularly interesting group of patients or technology or research knowledge or know-how, the particular experts? What does it bring back to MD Anderson? And then we look at institutional capability and commitment. Does the institution have resources? Are they committed to building this relationship? And those are things you really only find out by going and speaking to people. The commitment is particularly sometimes difficult to assess. In some cases it’s very clear. In other cases it takes a while to work it out.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
0:16:12 I suppose it can shift too. You were talking about the cultivating and sustaining of these relationships.
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
0:16:17 Right. It shifts, yes. I mean, sometimes leadership changes at our partner institutions can mean that we essentially hit the reset button, we have to rebuild trust and connection with the new president or leader of the institution. You know, very often the leaders who build the relationships with us have connections to MD Anderson, either they’ve spent time here or they have some other connection. For them, it’s an obvious opportunity and advantage. But when a new leader comes in who may not have had that history with us, you have to kind of go back and renurture it. So that’s why it’s a continuous cycle.
Recommended Citation
Rosolowksi, Tacey A. PhD and Bogler, Oliver PhD, "Chapter 14: Global Academic Programs: Activities and Services Offered to Partners" (2014). Interview Chapters. 1570.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1570
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