Monmouth's Ask the Doctor July/August

Commemorating the Contributions of Cancer Research Greats By, Norman E. Sharpless, M.D. There are those moments, those events that make it the ideal time to stop and reflect on the past.

H E A L T H A R T I C L E S A N D Q & A

Such is the case with the passing of Dr. Emil Freireich, who died in February at the age of 93 in Houston, his long-time home. Having be gun his career in the 1950s at NCI, Dr. Freire ich went on to become one of the most accom plished physician–scientists to ever step into a lab or comfort a worried patient. I never had the opportunity to work with Dr. Freireich. But like so many other cancer re searchers, I was influenced by his work. He pro vides a preeminent example of how our own ac tions can have an enduring impact on so many others.

Dr. Bruce Chabner, a cancer research lumi nary (and another NCI alumnus), who was kind enough to provide some thoughts on Dr. Freireich, described him as “formidable” and “brilliant,” a man who often had a smile on his face but wasn’t “afraid to challenge people.” When describing Dr. Freireich’s accomplishments and legacy, it’s only appropriate to mention another research legend, Dr. Emil "Tom" Frei, who died in 2013. Many in the cancer community are familiar with the story of the “two Emils,” who worked together at NCI, and later at other institutions, pioneering the approach of giving children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) several chemo therapy drugs at the same time. Over the course of a decade, the combination chemotherapy approach they developed transformed what was for chil dren “a horrible disease—a death sentence,” as Dr. Freireich once described it, into a cancer for which cures became com monplace. What often gets less attention is that some of their studies testing combination chemotherapy for childhood ALL also heralded the introduction of the cooperative clinical trial in cancer: researchers at different centers all working on the same study, using the same treatments and protocols, in an effort to answer their scientific question more rapidly and with more robust data. It’s not hard to look at this milestone and see how it laid the groundwork for today’s clinical trials enterprise. For exam ple, NCI’s National Clinical Trials Network includes five large research groups and more than 2,000 clinical sites, and it conducts hundreds of trials at any given time. In many ways, this massive network of cutting-edge science was born from those first group trials of combination chemotherapy that Drs. Freireich and Frei helped to organize. Of course, Drs. Freireich and Frei made many other contributions. Dr. Freireich, for instance, partnered with the father of a patient at the NIH Clinical Center who worked at IBM to create the first device to separate out blood components from fresh human blood. He showed that the platelets separated from whole blood could be used to treat a serious complication of blood cancers: hemorrhage. As Dr. Chabner explained, this advance was “absolutely fundamental to the treatment of lymphomas and leukemias. Kids were dying because of hemorrhage.” These accomplishments alone would have amounted to stellar scientific careers. But after moving to the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in 1965, Drs. Freireich and Frei continued their work, directing studies that led to continued improvements in the treatment of blood cancers. Dr. Frei left MD Anderson in the early 1970s for the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He took the reins as its director not long after, following the passing of the center’s namesake and yet another research icon, Dr. Sidney Farber. In addition to helping construct a world-class cancer research program at Dana-Farber, Dr. Frei continued his own research, including pioneering work on bone marrow transplants to treat cancer. Dr. Emil Freireich, who died in February 2021, working with a blood cell separator at MD Anderson Cancer Center. Credit: National Cancer Institute

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