# Gianni Bonadonna

Source: https://onco.cc/people/gianni-bonadonna/  
OnCo record `gianni-bonadonna` (Person). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

The Milan oncologist whose 1976 trial showed that chemotherapy given after breast cancer surgery cuts the chance of the cancer coming back, and whose ABVD regimen became a standard treatment for Hodgkin lymphoma.

## Summary

Gianni Bonadonna (Milan, 28 July 1934 to 6 September 2015) trained in Milan, spent 1961 to 1964 in the United States, and worked the rest of his career at the Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, where he directed the Department of Medical Oncology. He ran early clinical evaluations of adriamycin (doxorubicin), bleomycin and epirubicin, introduced the ABVD regimen for Hodgkin lymphoma (first reported against MOPP in Cancer in 1975), and in 2007 ASCO named the Gianni Bonadonna Breast Cancer Award and lecture after him.

His trial in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1976 gave women with node-positive operable breast cancer prolonged cyclic cyclophosphamide, methotrexate and fluorouracil (CMF) after radical mastectomy: after 27 months, relapse had occurred in 24 per cent of 179 control patients against 5.3 per cent of 207 women given CMF. It is the trial the corpus's CMF regimen record cites as the first adjuvant chemotherapy shown to reduce breast cancer recurrence.

## Fields

- Kind: Person
- Last checked: 2026-11-03
- Tags: medical-oncology; trialist; pioneer
- Role: Medical oncologist; director of the Department of Medical Oncology, Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Milan (died 2015)
- Specialisms: Adjuvant chemotherapy for breast cancer; Hodgkin lymphoma; Anthracyclines

## Sources

- Wikipedia (Italian): https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gianni_Bonadonna

## Connected records

- people: [Umberto Veronesi](https://onco.cc/people/umberto-veronesi/)
- cancers: [Breast cancer (all types)](https://onco.cc/cancers/breast-cancer/), [Hodgkin lymphoma](https://onco.cc/cancers/hodgkin-lymphoma/)
- institutions: [Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori](https://onco.cc/institutions/int-milan/)
- key papers: [Adjuvant CMF chemotherapy after mastectomy for node-positive breast cancer (Bonadonna 1976)](https://onco.cc/key-papers/paper-bonadonna-adjuvant-cmf-nejm-1976/)

---
JSON: https://onco.cc/api/v1/entities/gianni-bonadonna.json