News & Events: Latest News
Source: Jeffrey Norris, UCSF Science Cafe
February 3, 2010
UCSF Chancellor Cites Need for Faster Pipeline of Better, Cheaper Drugs for Cancer Patients
Before coming to UCSF, Chancellor Susan Desmond-Hellmann, MD, MPH, was a practicing oncologist, and later she was president of product development at Genentech, where she took the lead in developing some of the most successful cancer-fighting drugs in history.
Among these drugs are Avastin, Rituxan, Tarceva and Herceptin, the last of which was the first anti-cancer treatment tailored to target a molecule that is abnormally produced in a difficult-to-treat subset of breast cancers.
Given her background, it’s no surprise that Desmond-Hellmann was asked to deliver the keynote address at this year’s annual symposium for the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center’s Breast Oncology Program Scientific Retreat last week. Watch the address on YouTube.
The theme of her talk was the need for smarter drug development that harnesses all available information on clinical outcomes, genetics, tumor biology and early “surrogate” signs of positive responses to treatment to identify the most promising drugs and move them through the pipeline more quickly to meet the needs of cancer patients.
Golden Age of Drug Development
During her talk, Desmond-Hellmann referred to the years from 1997 to 2001 as the golden years. It was then that the drugs Rituxan, Herceptin and Gleevec became widely available for treatment, with each having a great impact on patient survival and in changing the ways that researchers and physicians think about cancer. UCSF can play an important role in initiating a new golden age of drug development, Desmond-Hellmann says.
