Conversations with the Pioneers of Oncology: Dr. John Minna

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.

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.

Welcome to Cancer Stories. I'm Dr. Daniel Hayes, a medical oncologist. And I'm a translational researcher at the University of Michigan Rogel Cancer Center. And I'm also the past president of ASCO.

Over the next several podcasts, I am privileged to be your host for a series of interviews with the founders of our field. Over the last 40 years, I've been fortunate to have been trained, mentored, and frankly, inspired by many of these pioneers.

It's my hope that through these conversations, we can all be equally inspired by gaining an appreciation of the courage, the vision, and the scientific understanding that led these men and women to establish the field of cancer clinical care over the last 70 years.

By understanding of 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, where we offer patients better treatments, and are also able to support them and their families during and after cancer treatment.

Today, I am very pleased to have as my guest on this podcast, Dr. John Minna. John is generally considered one of the pioneers of translational research in solid tumors, and he's widely recognized as a leader in lung cancer.

Dr. Minna is currently the director of the Hammond Center for Therapeutic Oncology Research, and Professor of Internal Medicine and Pharmacology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, where he also holds the Max L. Thomas Distinguished Chair in Molecular Pulmonary Oncology, and the Sarah M. and Charles E. Seay Distinguished Chair in Cancer Research. Dr. Minna received undergraduate medical degrees from Stanford in the mid-1960s, which were followed by a residency at Harvard's Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. He then went to the NIH, and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute for his fellowship in biochemical genetics at the NIH with Dr. Marshall Nirenberg. And then he stayed at the NHLBI as the head of the section on somatic cell genetics.

In 1975, he became chief of the NCI-VA Medical Oncology branch within the Clinical Oncology program of the Division of Cancer Treatment. And in 1991, he then moved to University of Texas Southwestern in Dallas, where he served as the director of the Sammons Cancer Center and Chief of the Division of Medical Oncology for four years. And since, he has held his current position. Doctor Minna has authored over 700 peer-reviewed papers, and well over 100 other reviews, book chapters, and educationally related manuscripts. He's won too many awards and honors for me to go through in detail. But these include the AACR's Rosenthal award, and ASCO's Scientific Achievement Award, two of the highest in those two organizations.

He's also received the ASCO Statesman Award, and he's served on both the AACR and the ASCO boards of directors. He's been PI of the combined UTSW and M.D. Anderson Cancer Center Lung Cancer Specialized Program in Research Excellence. And in 2015, he was named one of the Giants of Oncology by OncLive.

Dr. Minna, that's quite a mouthful, though. Welcome to our program. Thank you so much, Dan. And thanks for all your work in ASCO and everything, too. Well, actually, it was, as you can imagine, a great privilege. I just had a fabulous time. Just as an aside, when I got elected, I interviewed about 10 former presidents. And at the end of each of my set of questions, I said, well, fill in the blanks. What do you want to talk about? Almost everyone of them said the saddest day of their career was the day they had to quit being president of ASCO. And I know that now. Anyway, now I know you went to Stanford. Were you always a California boy? Or how did you get to Stanford? Well, yes. I was born in San Francisco, actually at the Presidio, which is now a fancy movie set-- some of the priciest real estate. And then, my dad was in the Army. My mom was a nurse. And then I grew up i...