Conversations with the Pioneers of Oncology: Dr. Franco Muggia

Dr. Hayes interviews Dr. Muggia about his time at NCI.

Dr. Daniel F. Hayes is the Stuart B. Padnos Professor of Breast Cancer Research at the University of Michigan Rogel Cancer Center. Dr. Hayes’ research interests are in the field of experimental therapeutics and cancer biomarkers, especially in breast cancer. He has served as chair of the SWOG Breast Cancer Translational Medicine Committee, and he was an inaugural member and chaired the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Tumor Marker Guidelines Committee. Dr. Hayes served on the ASCO Board of Directors, and served a 3 year term as President of ASCO from 2016-2018.

TRANSCRIPT:

The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care, and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions. Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience, and conclusions. The mention of any product, service, organization, activity, or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement. [MUSIC PLAYING] Welcome to JCO's Cancer Stories, the Art of Oncology, brought to you by the ASCO Podcast Network-- a collection of nine programs carrying a range of educational and scientific content, and offering enriching insight into the role of cancer care. You can find all of the shows, including this one, at podcast.asco.org. [MUSIC PLAYING] Hi, and welcome to Cancer Stories. I'm Dr. Daniel Hayes. I'm the medical oncologist, and I'm also a researcher at the University of Michigan local cancer center. And I'm the past president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology. I am truly privileged to be your host for a series of podcast interviews with the founders of our field. Over the last 40 years, I've really been fortunate. I've been trained, mentored, and I've been inspired by many of these pioneers. It's my hope that through these conversations, we can all be equally inspired and gain an appreciation of the courage and the vision, and frankly, the scientific understanding that led these men and women to establish the field of clinical cancer care over the last 70 years. I hope that by understanding how we got to the present and what we now consider normal in oncology, we can also imagine and work together towards a better future for our patients and their families during and after cancer treatment. Today, I'm pleased to have, as my guests on this podcast, Dr. Franco Muggia. He's generally considered one of the pioneers of new drug development oncology going all the way back to the 1960s. Dr. Muggia is currently a professor of medicine and co-chair of the GYN Cancer Working Group at NYU, and a member of their breast cancer program. He was born in Turin, Italy before the war. But when he was about three years old, his family fled to Ecuador to escape Mussolini's fascism. After growing up there at the age of 18, he moved to the United States in Danbury, Connecticut, to finish high school. And then he received his undergraduate degree in biophysics from Yale in 1957. In 1964, he became a US citizen. But he's remained true to his roots and has been very involved with both US/Italian cancer collaborations and mentorship, and also with South America for decades. He went to medical school at Cornell, followed by an internship at Bellevue in New York City, and a residency at Hartford Hospital in Connecticut. He completed a fellowship in medical oncology hospital in 1964-1967. And we're going to talk about that, Franco. And since he's had a number of important academic positions at Einstein, the NCI, University of Southern California, and New York University on two different occasions, and that's where he still practices. He's been involved in the development of clinical trials of hundreds of new drugs through the years, perhaps most notably, cisplatinum. In regards to ASCO, he served on our cancer education committee and on the editorial board of JCO. In fact, I understand you were the first editor of the Spanish edition of JCO. Correct. Correct. And perhaps more importantly, he's been a direct, and an indirect, mentor of hundreds of medical oncologists of the decades at that many institutions he's served, including myself, frankly, in my association with his good friend, George Canellos. Dr. Muggia, welcome to our program. Thank you very much, Dan. And I would just say, just a comment on the citizenship. So once I became a citizen, I actually became eligible for the draft. And that was the main reason why I ended up at the National Cancer Institute. So it had a-- it was a great effect on my career, that I actually volunteered for the Public Health Service in 1969. Because Lyndon Johnson changed the rules for physicians. And if you hadn't served, you had to serve up to age 35. So I decided I should join, not head to Vietnam like the rest of my classmates-- like many of my classmates from Cornell. And it really was a career change for me. Actuall...