People

In September, Thomas J. Eichler, MD, staff physician at the Sarah Cannon Research Institute in Nashville, TN, began a 1-year term as president of the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) at the organization's annual meeting in Chicago, IL. He succeeds Theodore L. DeWeese, MD. Eichler previously served as medical director of radiation oncology at Sarah Cannon, president of Virginia Radiation Oncology Associates in Richmond, and associate medical director of Louis Busch Hager Cancer Center in Cooperstown, NY.

The European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) gave its ESMO Award to Eric Van Cutsem, MD, PhD, at the ESMO 2019 Congress in Barcelona, Spain, to recognize his contributions in gastrointestinal oncology. Van Cutsem's research has focused on developing targeted therapies for colorectal, gastric, and pancreatic cancers, including anti-EGFR and anti-HER2 agents. He has also worked on improving diagnostic imaging tools. Van Cutsem is a professor of internal medicine at the University of Leuven in Belgium, and head of the Digestive Oncology Unit at the University Hospital Gasthuisberg in Leuven.

Also at the ESMO Congress, Angelo Di Leo, MD, received the ESMO Lifetime Achievement Award to honor his career studying breast cancer and developing personalized therapies to treat it. For example, he published one of the first studies identifying topoisomerase IIα as a predictive biomarker of response to anthracyclines. Di Leo is head of the Sandro Pitigliani Medical Oncology Unit and chair of the Oncology Department at the Hospital of Prato, Istituto Toscano Tumori in Italy.

For more news on cancer research, visit Cancer Discovery online at http://cancerdiscovery.aacrjournals.org/CDNews.