Clifford A. Hudis, MD, chief of the breast cancer medicine service at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) in New York, NY, began a 1-year term as president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) at its 2013 Annual Meeting in Chicago, IL, on June 3. Hudis focuses his research on preventing and treating breast cancer recurrence, conducting clinical and translational studies to develop more effective hormone therapies, less-toxic chemotherapies, and targeted agents.
Martine J. Piccart, MD, PhD, president of the European Society for Medical Oncology, received the David A. Karnofsky Memorial Award on June 1 at ASCO's 2013 Annual Meeting. The award recognizes her leadership in breast cancer research and drug development. A professor of oncology at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and director of medicine at the Jules Bordet Institute in Brussels, Belgium, Piccart is the cofounder and chair of the Breast International Group, which unites 49 research groups and currently runs more than 30 clinical trials.
Also at the ASCO meeting, Charles L. Sawyers, MD, head of the Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program at MSKCC and president of the American Association for Cancer Research, received the Science of Oncology Award on June 2. The award honors his research on prostate cancer and how it progresses to a state of castration resistance, no longer controlled through androgen deprivation. Working with both castration-sensitive and castration-resistant xenografts, he found that increased androgen receptor expression was both necessary and sufficient to confer resistance.
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