Chapter 15 : Global Academic Programs: Building Research Partnerships
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Description
Next Dr. Bogler explains the benefits that MD Anderson derives from such collaborations, specifically an opportunity to research rare cancers or research questions not ordinarily funded by American sources. MD Anderson also can take advantage of the expertise of researchers trained in other contexts.
Dr. Bogler explains how some of these projects have matured, being awarded NIH grants and yielding prestigious publications. He explains the criteria the Network uses to select grantees. He explains that his goal (and the goal of GAP) is to maximize inclusivity of researchers and institutions and to activate partners in all areas of research, not just the cutting edge trends. He explains that some partners are not in a situation to take advantage of the latest cancer treatments. He explains why many are very interested in palliative care, for example. He notes that partners do research in areas that American funding sources tend to ignore –alternative medicine, for example. He stresses that the range of research at MD Anderson is very broad.
Identifier
BoglerO_02_20141117_C015
Publication Date
10-11-2014
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
Keywords
An Institutional Unit; The Researcher; Contributions; MD Anderson Impact; Institutional Processes; Business of Research; Beyond the Institution; On Research and Researchers; Research, Care, and Education; Understanding Cancer, the History of Science, Cancer Research; Global Issues –Cancer, Health, Medicine; Cultural/Social Influences; Patients, Treatment, Survivors
Topics Covered
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center - An Institutional Unit; The Researcher; Contributions; MD Anderson Impact; Institutional Processes; Business of Research; Beyond the Institution; On Research and Researchers; Research, Care, and Education; Understanding Cancer, the History of Science, Cancer Research; Global Issues –Cancer, Health, Medicine; Cultural/Social Influences; Patients, Treatment, Survivors
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
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
So then what else do we do with our partners? We do the academic things. We have a continuous flow of people going back and forth. We host delegations all the time. And then in the program, we have certain core activities. We have the annual conference, GAP annual conference, and that is held—now actually in recent history is held at MD Anderson in odd-numbered years, and starting in 2012, we’ve gone abroad. So we’ve done it exactly twice. In 2012 we went to Norway, and that’s another great relationship. We have a relationship with what we call the Norwegian Cancer Consortium, which is three institutions. It’s the Stavanger University Hospital and the Radium Hospital of Oslo University and the Cancer Registry. And they actually persuaded us to hold the conference outside. So this was really their idea much more than ours. They said, “Why don’t we do this.” And we initially thought, “Well, that’s pretty risky,” but they persuaded us and—
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
0:18:07 Why did you think it was risky?
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
0:18:08 Well, one of the cores of the conference had been that it was the opportunity of everybody in the Network to come once a year to MD Anderson and refresh their relationships with our people, and that was a big part of the draw. And we always held, always do hold, the one here. When it’s here in town, we hold it either right before ASCO or right before AACR so that people who are coming to the United States for those big conferences anyway, for them it’s easier to add a couple of days and see us. And we were afraid that if we went to Oslo, well, why would a doctor from a third independent country go to Oslo? They might not see the person that they want to see most at that conference. So we decided that this is not going to be the goal of the conference when it’s not in Houston. A big goal of the conference when it’s somewhere else is to sort of showcase and highlight what that sister institution is interested in and focused on and good at, and we’d have a different kind of meeting every other year. So in Oslo, we were about six hundred people. It was very successful, I thought, and it highlighted some of the interesting Registry work that goes on there, a lot of breast cancer research, all the good research at Radium and Stavanger, and it was a really good conference. Let me think. 2012, I think that was Dr. DePinho’s first conference, because he joined the institution September of 2011. I think that’s correct. And our previous GAP conference in 2011, that one would have been in the spring, so he didn’t see that one. So this was his first one. A key part of the conference is that it’s also when we hold our annual board meeting where we have a representative from each of the sister institutions at a board meeting, we discuss progress over the past year and strategy, and we listen to our partners and so on. So I think for Dr. DePinho, that was the first time he had a chance to hear that, and I think he saw in that the power of the GAP network. Right now we’re thirty-one partner institutions in, I think, twenty-two countries, and many of them are the topnotch cancer places. So once a year, they gather around us and we have an opportunity to talk about what we can do and what opportunities there are. You know, of course, Dr. DePinho’s very broad and strong vision for how to deal with the cancer problem. He emphasizes international collaboration and translation of our efforts into other countries, right? So the GAP network is a great tool, hopefully, in that. I think he sees it that way. He’s been great supporter of the program, as, of course, was Dr. Mendelsohn, who initially came up with the idea. You can see why. I mean, this is an opportunity for the institution to connect, and so he saw that there for the first time. Anyway, the Norway conference, I think, was a great success. Two years later, this past May 2014, we were in Seoul. Yonsei Cancer Center was our host. It was another extremely good conference, actually larger and really broad, and we had some really excellent science there. Seoul was a really good venue for our first Asian meeting, because it’s geographically very central in Asia, so a lot of folks came from our Asian partners. And in 2016, we will be in São Paulo. We’ll be collectively hosted by the three partners we have there, and that’s going to be another exciting meeting. So that conference is a really key part. It’s really not a typical conference. It has some high-level speakers, of course, from the Network and so on, but it’s really the focus of the conference is workshop-style meetings focused on common areas of interest, so that the idea is that people with a shared focus can meet once a year, compare progress, find, rebuild collaborations, and things like that.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
0:22:05 Yeah, I was going to say that’s probably a much more effective way of cultivating connection, too, than sitting with talking heads, I mean, where most of that networking has to occur after-hours of the conference.
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
0:22:15 Right. Exactly. And, you know, the world is full of excellent cancer conferences, you know, and, as I say, when we’re here, we do it right before AACR, ASCO, so you’re going to get all the great talks on cancer there that you could possibly want. So this has a little bit of a different focus and a different purpose, really, because it’s—one thing I’ve learned in my experience in GAP is that really being effective at networking still has a lot to do with being in the same room with someone and being in the same space. Wonderful communication advances have been made in the last several decades, but ultimately people still want you to visit them, they want to visit you, they want to sit around a table with you and talk to you. It’s just, I think, very sort of fundamental to our biology.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
0:23:02 Help me understand, maybe using the example of the Colombia institution, what MD Anderson gets from a relationship, a sister institution relationship.
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
0:23:15 Yeah. So I didn’t really finish that story. So we went to visit them several times and started building relationships, and before they become a sister institution, we really insist on broadening the basis of their interaction so it’s not enough—if it’s just a small group interacting with a small group, we’re happy to support it maybe with an MOU, and we do that on occasion.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
0:23:36 An MOU again?
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
0:23:37 A memorandum of understanding. But for it really to become sort of a higher tier, which we call the sister institutions, we really want to see multiple departments, different areas of cancer research, and that just gives us the breadth. So we spent several months building that breadth and brought in some other groups that are working in there, and then we sign them on. And I have to say that IDC is a great example of an institution that’s very interested in what we do, very connected, and they’ve sent many teams over to us, but not just physicians, interestingly enough, but also people involved in management and structure and so on. Now, in addition to a very committed chief medical officer there, they also have a chief business guy who’s very connected to MD Anderson, and he was actually active in the municipal government. He was, I think, the Minister of Health for the city of Medellin, or the Secretary of Health, I think, might be the more appropriate term. Together with him now, Dr. Hawk in our Cancer Prevention Group has built a tobacco-cessation program for the city. So that’s a great example of how this has now become a leveraging point, and IDC, Instituto de Cancerologia, is like the dominant cancer institution in that city, and because of Dr. Yetis [phonetic], they have connections to the city government, and this became a natural extension. I should mention another partner. I mean, we have many, but the National Cancer Institute of Mexico, INCAN, has been another great partner of ours. And with them also now, Dr. Hawk and Dr. DePinho are working on a tobacco-cessation program here at the federal level with the Ministries of Health and Education. So these are new developments in which GAP is supporting it, but we’ve invested quite a lot in our Latin American network and have sort of almost also done some things with that group as a separate subgroup of our entire network, and now, hopefully, we’ll have the opportunity to take some of these initiatives and also bring them to other centers. We have partners also in Peru, and, of course, in also Brazil I mentioned. So I think that’s very, very positive.
Recommended Citation
Rosolowksi, Tacey A. PhD and Bogler, Oliver PhD, "Chapter 15 : Global Academic Programs: Building Research Partnerships" (2014). Interview Chapters. 1573.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1573
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