CHARLES SAWYERS
Chair, Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
Researcher, Howard Hughes Medical InstituteDR. C SAWYERS 14/RUBENSTEIN/WIKIMEDIA COMMONSEven before beginning a clinical fellowship at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), in 1988, Charles Sawyers already had an intense interest in chronic myeloid leukemia (CML). In the late ’80s, allogeneic bone-marrow transplants were a cutting-edge therapy that gave CML patients a chance at a cure. Sawyers had cared for a patient with chronic-phase CML. “He was my own age, a fireman,” recalls Sawyers. After the transplant, the patient developed graft-versus-host disease and died. “That had a profound impact on me—to watch someone with a lethal disease, who was feeling fine and probably would have survived for 5 years with standard therapy, make the decision to undergo a potentially curative therapy and die from its toxicity. ‘There has to be a better way,’ I thought.”
Sawyers had moved to UCLA so he could work in Owen Witte’s laboratory on the molecular determinants of CML. Witte was the first to clone the BCR-ABL oncogene, a fusion gene created by a translocation that gives rise to the Philadelphia chromosome, now known to be responsible for CML. “It was incredibly exciting to now have demonstrations that cancer can be caused by a single genetic event,” says Sawyers, who received both his clinical and research training at a turning point in oncology—when laboratory studies on the molecular biology of cancer began to merge with clinical care. “The whole cancer field was asking whether these oncogenes were really capable of causing cancer in an experimental model.”
“I would like to see every patient’s tumor genotyped ...
