Chapter 18: Global Academic Programs: Changes Under Dr. Ronald DePinho and The Future
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Description
Dr. Bogler begins this Chapter by observing that, as a laboratory scientist, he does not have the expertise to fully develop clinical possibilities in Global Academic Programs. He began to transition out in 2012 when he was diagnosed with cancer and Dr. Kian Ang, who had a clinical focus, led GAP until June of 2013. He notes that he returned to lead GAP at Dr. Ethan Dimitrovsky’s [Oral History Interview] request.
Dr. Bogler talks about the new expectations Dr. Ronald DePinho brought to GAP once he assumed the presidency of the institution. He then talks about the Prevention Moon Shot and points out that GAP is serving as a platform to link MD Anderson to partners. He describes a trip that executive leaders at MD Anderson have made to Lisbon to talk about partnerships.
Dr. Bogler states that Dr. DePinho has a clear and courageous vision. He understands concerns that academics might have regarding the short timeline of the Moon Shots Program. However, speaking as a patient, he says, it’s a profoundly courageous message.
Dr. Bogler then summarizes future directions for GAP. He mentions the need to develop international clinical trials and his hopes that the Sister Network Research Fund will remain strong. He notes that the originally academic connection created with the Albert Einstein Hospital in Sao Paolo was transformed into a Business Associate relationship with clinical interactions and an opportunity for co-branding. He notes that other GAP partnerships could follow suit.
Dr. Bogler ends this Chapter with observations about how MD Anderson needs to balance concerns with maintaining its reputation with its mission and need to have strong international impact. He summarizes what partnerships can mean to MD Anderson.
Identifier
BoglerO_02_20141117_C018
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
Keywords
An Institutional Unit; Institutional Processes; Beyond the Institution; Global Issues –Cancer, Health, Medicine; Research, Care, and Education; Understanding the Institution; Leadership; Portraits; Institutional Mission and Values; The Business of MD Anderson; The MD Anderson Brand, Reputation; Cultural/Social Influences; Healing, Hope, and the Promise of Research; Patients, Treatment, Survivors; Patients
Topics Covered
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center - An Institutional Unit; Institutional Processes; Beyond the Institution; Global Issues –Cancer, Health, Medicine; Research, Care, and Education; Understanding the Institution; Leadership; Portraits; Institutional Mission and Values; The Business of MD Anderson; The MD Anderson Brand, Reputation; Cultural/Social Influences; Healing, Hope, and the Promise of Research; Patients, Treatment, Survivors; Patients
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:
That brings me to my very last GAP point, which is that one thing I cannot do for the team, because I’m a lab guy, is to really leverage the investment that we’ve made for clinical research, and that’s crying out to be done. I want to just take a moment and mention Dr. Kian Ang. So Kian, professor in Radiation Oncology, head and neck expert and researcher, really just an amazing guy, so he led the GAP program from October 2012 to June 2013, so he took over when I was diagnosed with cancer and could no longer travel, and did a fantastic job. And part of the reason, actually, it was Dr. Buchholz, who was provost at interim at the time, he appointed Kian, and I think it was a brilliant thing to do because Kian was just perfect for the job. He had roots in Indonesia, had done his training in Belgium, was a very international person, and was doing great clinical research internationally. And what we were all excited about was that Kian would really realize the potential of the Network for international clinical trials. That was his forte and his interest. [Redacted] Dr. Dmitrovsky asked me to take the program back. He was at that point coming on board because I think he joined us in July, if I recall, of that year, so he was just in the [unclear]. So I’ve been running the program since then sort of on an ad interim basis. So that’s my checkered history with GAP.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
0:55:58 Yeah, wow. I had a couple extra questions I wanted to ask you about that, about GAP. One is—and you’ve alluded to Dr. DePinho’s perspective and involvement in GAP, the way he’s been leveraging it for the Moon Shots program. But I wanted to ask you very explicitly in what ways has the focus of GAP shifted or perhaps the relevance of GAP shifted since Dr. DePinho took over the reins of the institution from John Mendelsohn.
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
0:56:37 Yeah, that’s a good question. I think Dr. DePinho has set new expectations and new goals for the team. And the two governmental collaborations I mentioned earlier I think are good examples. So Dr. DePinho’s vision of cancer, in my opinion, is very broad, and he correctly points to the fact that there’s huge opportunities to have impact on cancer with the knowledge we have today and has urged the institution to get more involved in things like policy and implementation of prevention programs. So that’s a completely new thing, and we’re taking, I think, some real initiative now through the Cancer Prevention-Moon Shots platform, Dr. Hawk and Mark Moreno, who collaborated. I mean, that’s a really interesting collaboration. You have a government relations expert working with a cancer prevention oncology expert.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
0:57:46 I’m sorry. I missed the names, if you could mention them.
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
0:57:49 Hawk, Ernie Hawk, our VP for Prevention, and Mark Moreno is our VP of Government Relations. So they are co-leaders of this platform. Dr. DePinho has essentially said this platform needs to have access to GAP to leverage or to use GAP itself as a platform to bring these kinds of areas, kinds of activities to our partners. This week, actually, Dr. DePinho’s in Portugal together with two of my GAP team, Hilario, I’ve already mentioned, and Cam Francis [phonetic], and he is a guest of—and he’s with Dr. Hawk and Dr. Lopez-Berestein, one of our faculty, and they are being co-hosted by the Portuguese government and the U.S. Embassy there. They’re there for a whole week. They’re touring multiple institutions, cancer institutions in Portugal, looking for opportunities to collaborate and sharing our vision with them. There’s a symposium in Lisbon with several other faculty joining them. That’s a huge, high-level trip. I mean, Portugal, of course, feels very connected to Dr. DePinho because of his Portuguese roots. He’s also been invited by a group called the Portuguese Diaspora to give, I think, a presentation later in the year. So I think that’s a great synergy between our global program and Dr. DePinho’s vision of connecting at a high level with people, and I think Dr. Mendelsohn had similar connections, but he didn’t really use GAP so much as a platform or as a supporting team for those kinds of activities. I mean, for me, it’s exciting because I see our role as following the president on this visit and helping to make sure that the things we connect on then have follow-up. I think that’s critical. I would have gone myself, but I have to go to the Gates Foundation on Wednesday for the Africa work with Pink Ribbons. Otherwise I would have been along with Dr. DePinho, but this is another—I’m the only one who can do this. I have a great team members who can support him when he’s traveling in Portugal. That’s, I think, sort of a glimpse of how he feels we should work. I mentioned First Ladies earlier. We’ve connected him with the First Lady of Mozambique, and the President of Ethiopia visited recently, so he’s very eager to engage with heads of state or people close to heads of state to bring the message and support activities. I think Dr. DePinho has a great vision for cancer. I think he has a very clear vision, and I think it’s a courageous vision. I think he took some flak for the Moon Shots programs initially, and I think as a cancer patient, I do understand the concerns of some academics whenever someone stands up and says, “We’re really going to do something about this problem.” Cancer has proven a very difficult problem, and I think it’s courageous to set any kind of timeline to that. But as a patient, I find that is a profoundly important message, and I think if people aren’t willing to get up and say courageous things about what we’re going to do and what goals we set for ourselves, then we’re not going to take the initiative or we’re not going to realize the opportunities that are there. So I think GAP is hopefully a good tool for him to bring that sort of courage and conviction to all parts of the world.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
1:02:01 What do you envision or hope for GAP as you look into the future, things maybe left undone or—
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
1:02:11 I think the critical thing is the critical trials work. So I think Dr. Dmitrovsky’s got this really great vision of recruiting someone into this vice provost position for Critical and Integrated Research who is an experienced clinical trials person and who will not only take care of the clinical trials activities at MD Anderson, but because they will also be given the GAP team, that will be the next stage in its evolution. I think that’s also Dr. DePinho’s desire to see that, see those clinical trials go on. Now, international clinical trials are challenging. They’re difficult. There are many regulatory hurdles. There are bureaucratic hurdles. There are all kinds of problems and things that you have to solve. As I said, I’m personally not—I don’t have that experience. Kian Ang had that, and that was the path we’d set. So through Kian’s death, we suffered a setback in that particular part of our vision, and we’re coming back and moving forward. So I think that’s the next step. I very much hope that the SINF will stay. It’s been transformative. It can certainly be modified to include other things, or the vice provost, the new vice provost will have perhaps their own ideas. But I think that part’s working very well, and it’s something I feel comfortable with and that’s in my area of expertise, and, as I said, this is really—so I think we’ve got that in place. Now we need to work on the clinical research aspect. So that to me is clearly the next thing. I don’t know what will happen five or ten years down the road. One of the things we have seen a little bit of is that Cancer Network work has shown some connectivity, so the first international associate in Cancer Network, which is a new type of relationship with MD Anderson, is the Albert Einstein Hospital in São Paolo, which has been a sister institution for many years and was one before it became an international associate. It just became an international associate, I think, about six months ago, formally now. For years, running up to that designation, they were working very intensely with the Cancer Network team, with Amy Hay and her group. But that’s a great example of where a relationship that initially was purely academic has now expanded to also include more formal interaction on the clinical arena. So we’re now helping them manage their clinical cancer program, we’re helping credential it, we’re insisting on certain quality metrics we vouch for, and they have a co-branding opportunity, not the full co-branding, but, as I said, they’re designated as an international associate—oh, gosh, I’m going to get it wrong—international associate in the Cancer Network is the appropriate term, yeah. So I can see that there are several other partners in our GAP network who might very well go down that road, and so that’s a—you know. MD Anderson gets regular invitations to participate in international projects, and I think several American institutions or institutes as perhaps seen from other parts of the world may learn some lessons about the risks involved. I think we are now well calibrated in balancing legitimate concerns about our identity, our reputation, our brand, if you will, but certainly just our reputation. That needs to be thought of very carefully. And then at the other hand, we also have our mission, which is to have international impact, and so we need to balance those two. I think we’re pretty well calibrated right now. But the demand internationally is strong. I mean, cancer is becoming more of a problem. More people are dying from cancer every year, not fewer. And people want our expertise, and I think it’s our mission to make it available in a way that we can, in a way that makes sense, in a way that doesn’t harm us. So, yeah, I mean, maybe in ten, twenty years there’ll be a lot more international connectivity that carries our name more prominently and where we are perhaps more engaged. But I think that has to be done thoughtfully and cautiously.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
1:06:48 I think it sounds really exciting.
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
1:06:49 I agree. I agree. I agree. So, I mean, other centers have gone down this road. Some of them have retreated a little bit down the road. Others are still in there. Some have the reputation that they simply sell their name. We clearly want to avoid that. We’ve learned some lessons in that particular area. So I think now when you see our name, I think depending on how it’s presented, you can have a lot of—if it’s an international associate, you realize it’s not an MD Anderson doctor you’re going to meet there, but you do realize that we’re connected. We’ve helped them build their program. They’re going to give MD Anderson-type treatment. They’re going to be good physicians. When you go into something like a center like Banner MD Anderson or MD Anderson Cancer Center at Cooper, you’re going to have an additional faith that these folks have been trained by us, that they’re in continuous contact with us. So I think our name does mean something, and it means something in those venues, too, and I think that may slow our rate of expansion in this way, but it means that when we do, it’s meaningful.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
1:08:11 Thanks.
Oliver Bogler, PhD:
1:08:11 Sure.
Recommended Citation
Rosolowksi, Tacey A. PhD and Bogler, Oliver PhD, "Chapter 18: Global Academic Programs: Changes Under Dr. Ronald DePinho and The Future" (2014). Interview Chapters. 1581.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1581
Conditions Governing Access
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