Dana-Farber Brigham Cancer Center
Where chemotherapy began (Farber, 1948) and where much of modern breast, lung, and myeloma oncology was defined.
Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center (DF/HCC) is the largest NCI-designated centre by grant funding. Firsts: aminopterin remissions, EGFR mutation discovery (Jänne/Johnson), KEYNOTE-522 leadership (Tolaney/Schmid partnership), myeloma drug development (Anderson), Profile genomic testing.
- Breast oncology (KEYNOTE-522, ADCs)
- Lung cancer genomics
- Myeloma
- Paediatric oncology
Ann Partridge led the POSITIVE trial showing women can safely pause hormone therapy to have a baby.
Discovered how lenalidomide works, launching the field of molecular-glue degraders, and defined clonal haematopoiesis before leading Dana-Farber.
A 12-year-old lymphoma patient of Sidney Farber whose 1948 radio broadcast launched the Jimmy Fund, which has funded Dana-Farber for more than 75 years.
Computational oncologist who built open tools for interpreting tumour genomes and predicting response.
With Emil Freireich he showed that combinations of drugs could cure childhood leukaemia, then extended the idea to Hodgkin lymphoma and to adjuvant treatment after surgery.
First author of the 2010 ipilimumab trial that proved immunotherapy could extend survival in melanoma.
A leading authority on inherited cancer risk and how BRCA carriers should be treated and screened.
Translated bortezomib and lenalidomide from bench to bedside, helping turn myeloma from a two-year to a decade-plus disease.
Nancy Lin is the leading authority on brain metastases from breast cancer, including the HER2CLIMB tucatinib data in patients with active brain disease.
Co-discovered EGFR mutations in lung cancer and has led the drug development that followed, from osimertinib to KRAS G12C inhibitors.
Led the DETERMINATION trial and many of the myeloma drug approvals of the past two decades.
A two-year-old with acute leukaemia treated by Sidney Farber with the folate antagonist aminopterin from December 1947. His temporary remission, reported in 1948, was the first evidence that a drug could turn back leukaemia.
Leads Dana-Farber's breast oncology division and many of the trials that moved ADCs and de-escalated therapy into breast cancer care.
In 1947-48 he showed that the folate antagonist aminopterin could send childhood leukaemia into remission, the first drug ever to do so. He then built Dana-Farber and, with Mary Lasker, won the 1971 National Cancer Act.
Leads kidney cancer research worldwide, including the adjuvant pembrolizumab and belzutifan trials.
Ursula Matulonis led the MIRASOL trial that gave ovarian cancer its first ADC with a survival benefit.
William Kaelin is the Nobel laureate whose work on VHL and HIF-2α led directly to belzutifan.
A multi-cancer blood test can be run in ordinary clinics, and most positive results can be resolved with imaging. But six in ten positives are false alarms that take months to resolve, and the test misses most cancers. Whether it reduces late-stage cancer or deaths is unknown; that requires randomised trials.
Patients whose kidney cancer has been removed but who are at high risk of recurrence (large or high-grade tumours, node involvement, or resected metastases) can now be offered a year of pembrolizumab, which increases the chance of being alive and cancer-free several years later. Roughly nine patients need treatment to prevent one recurrence at two years, and some will have permanent side effects, so shared decision-making matters. Why pembrolizumab succeeded where similar drugs failed is not fully understood.
DepMap is the lookup table drug hunters use to ask: which cancers would die if we blocked this gene, and how would we recognise them? It generated targets such as WRN and PRMT5-MTAP now in clinical trials, and it is public.
Many older people carry blood clones one or two steps from leukaemia, and those clones also drive heart disease through inflammation. CHIP is why blood-based cancer tests must filter out mutations from blood cells, and it opens a route to preventing both leukaemia and cardiovascular events in carriers.
This paper launched the immunotherapy era. It was the first randomised evidence that taking a brake off the immune system could extend life in a solid cancer, and it introduced clinicians to immune-related adverse events and to responses that arrive late or after apparent progression. Ipilimumab alone has since been superseded by PD-1 antibodies and combinations, but every checkpoint programme traces back to this result.