Marvels in Medicine: Dr. Gabriel Hortobagyi on Challenging Historical Dogmas in Breast Cancer

Welcome to a very special edition of OncLive^® On Air! I’m your host today, Gina Columbus.

OncLive^® On Air is a podcast from OncLive^®, which provides oncology professionals with the resources and information they need to provide the best patient care. In both digital and print formats, OncLive^® covers every angle of oncology practice, from new technology to treatment advances to important regulatory decisions.

But today, we had the pleasure of sitting down with Gabriel N. Hortobagyi, MD, who is the professor of medicine in the Department of Breast Medical Oncology and the Nellie B. Connally Chair in Breast Cancer at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

Dr. Hortbagyi, who is also program director of the Susan G. Komen Interdisciplinary Breast Fellowship Program at MD Anderson, was behind the development and promotion of neoadjuvant chemotherapy in patients with large tumors. He has also been very influential in the development of anthracyclines and taxanes in breast cancer treatment, while establishing a role for bisphosphonates in an effort to improve bone metastases management in patients with the disease.

Additionally, throughout his career, Dr. Hortbagyi has been behind development of gene therapies and gene expression profiling, while working toward the understanding of prognostic and predictive implications of its use in breast cancer. He has also been president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, and was chair of the Southwest Oncology Group from 2007 to 2017.

Due to these reasons and many others, Dr. Hortobagyi was recognized as the 2015 OncLive^® Giant of Cancer Care^® in Breast Cancer.

In our exclusive interview, Dr. Hortobagyi shared his journey through these therapeutic developments in breast cancer, some of the challenges he met along the way, and what he still hopes to tackle in the rest of his monumental career.