MD Anderson Cancer Center
MD Anderson is the largest cancer centre in the world by patient volume, with the biggest phase 1 programme and a leading CAR-NK effort.
Founded 1941. Moon Shots programme, largest early-phase trial unit globally, RCB index (Symmans), CAR-NK with Takeda, proton therapy centre, Breast Medical Oncology leadership in TNBC trials.
- Phase 1 trials
- CAR-NK
- Residual Cancer Burden index
- Proton therapy
- Moon Shots
Albert Koong is a radiation oncologist leading MD Anderson's radiation department, with a focus on pancreatic cancer and SBRT.
Anirban Maitra is a pancreatic cancer pathologist working on catching the disease early and understanding its precursors.
Christopher Flowers is a lymphoma specialist who leads MD Anderson's entire medical oncology division.
Leads one of the largest breast medical oncology departments, and led the ribociclib trial in premenopausal women.
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.
At the NCI in the early 1960s he and Emil Frei gave children four drugs at once, VAMP, against fierce opposition, and turned a uniformly fatal leukaemia into a curable one. He also worked out platelet transfusion.
Funda Meric-Bernstam runs the world's largest phase 1 programme and led the tumour-agnostic HER2 ADC study.
MD Anderson's chief scientist, a cell-cycle biologist who ran drug discovery in industry before leading the centre's research.
Hagop Kantarjian is one of the most prolific leukaemia investigators alive, and helped bring more than a dozen leukaemia drugs to approval.
Discovered that blocking CTLA-4 unleashes T cells against cancer, the work behind ipilimumab and the 2018 Nobel Prize.
Jennifer Litton led the EMBRACA trial that brought talazoparib to BRCA-mutated breast cancer.
Lung cancer leader behind trials that changed treatment of EGFR-mutant and stage III disease.
Mariana Chavez-MacGregor is a breast oncologist who studies how care is delivered and leads SWOG's international work.
Runs the platform that studies patients' tumours before and after immunotherapy to learn why checkpoint drugs work or fail.
Peter Pisters is the surgeon who has run the world's largest cancer centre since 2017.
Patients with newly diagnosed metastatic colorectal cancer whose tumour carries a BRAF V600E mutation, which is about 8-12% of cases, should now be offered encorafenib and cetuximab together with FOLFOX from the start rather than after chemotherapy fails; median survival has roughly doubled to about two and a half years. BRAF testing at diagnosis is therefore essential, alongside RAS and mismatch repair testing. The regimen is more toxic than chemotherapy alone.
Revumenib proved that a transcriptional dependency, rather than a kinase, can be drugged in leukaemia, opening treatment for two genetic subgroups that together cover roughly a third of AML plus most infant ALL. It is now approved and is being combined with venetoclax-azacitidine and intensive chemotherapy in front-line trials. Single-agent remissions are often short without transplant.
Patients with newly diagnosed advanced melanoma have a dual-checkpoint option that improves on nivolumab alone with only a modest increase in serious side effects, making it attractive for those unable to tolerate or unwilling to risk the toxicity of ipilimumab. It did not prove superior survival, and it has not been compared with nivolumab plus ipilimumab, which remains preferred for patients with brain metastases or other high-risk features. LAG-3 is now an established target under study in many other cancers.
VIALE-A turned a palliative regimen into one that produces remission in two-thirds of older AML patients and is now the reference treatment for anyone not fit for intensive chemotherapy. It shifted the field towards lower-intensity targeted combinations and opened the door to adding FLT3, IDH and menin inhibitors to the backbone. Cure remains uncommon and most patients relapse within two years.
ZUMA-2 gave patients with BTK-inhibitor-refractory mantle cell lymphoma, who previously had a median survival under a year, a therapy with durable remissions in a substantial fraction. Brexu-cel is now standard after BTK inhibitor failure and CAR-T is being tested earlier in the disease. Neurotoxicity rates are higher than in other lymphoma CAR-T trials.
ZUMA-1 showed that CAR-T can cure a meaningful fraction of adults whose aggressive lymphoma no longer responds to chemotherapy, a group with a historical median survival of about six months (SCHOLAR-1). Axi-cel became the first CAR-T approved for lymphoma and later the first to beat standard second-line therapy in ZUMA-7. The comparatively high neurotoxicity of CD28-costimulated products was also first characterised here.
INO-VATE made inotuzumab a standard salvage therapy for adult ALL and a common route to transplant, and, with the TOWER trial of blinatumomab, moved adult ALL from chemotherapy-only salvage to immunotherapy. Both drugs have since been pulled into front-line regimens. The liver toxicity signal shaped how transplant conditioning is chosen after inotuzumab.
Every checkpoint inhibitor, from ipilimumab to pembrolizumab, rests on this idea: the immune system can already recognise cancer and just needs its brakes released. It changed the goal of immunotherapy from vaccinating against tumours to unleashing existing T cells.