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Centerpoint Spring 2009 (PDF)

New Center Director Fights Cancer By Getting Personal

From the 14th floor of the new Smilow Cancer Hospital at Yale-New Haven, Tom Lynch likes what he sees. Below, workers prepare this state-of-the-art facility for its opening. Over at Yale’s campus, the medical school’s staid brick buildings keep company with sleek modern ones housing bioengineers and cell biologists. To the south, Interstate 95 skirts Long Island Sound and stretches toward Yale’s West Campus, a 136-acre research facility.

Thomas J. Lynch, Jr., MD, arrived in April as Director of Yale Cancer Center and physician-in-chief at Smilow. He came because the landscape here is so favorable for making real progress against cancer.  Yale made a huge commitment of resources for cancer treatment and research with the construction of Smilow and acquisition of the West Campus. Dr. Lynch commented that the Cancer Center remains an ideal size to form teams of practicing physicians and laboratory researchers collaborating to develop “personalized medicine” that will improve the odds for cancer patients at Yale and beyond.

His recruitment was vital to Yale’s cancer strategy, said Robert J. Alpern, MD, Dean of Yale School of Medicine. “The leader sets the upper limit for how good the faculty will be,” he said, calling leaders like Dr. Lynch “a magnet for talent.”

Marna P. Borgstrom, Yale-New Haven Hospital President and CEO, described him as “a superb clinician, teacher, mentor, and administrator. We’re delighted that Dr. Lynch will provide the medical leadership that interweaves clinical expertise with compassionate, family-centered care for our patients.”

After college and medical school at Yale, Dr. Lynch returned to his native Boston. He was a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and chief of hematology/oncology at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Cancer Center. A lung cancer expert, he also directed the Center for Thoracic Cancers at MGH and was director of medical oncology at the MGH Thoracic Oncology Center.

Dr. Lynch returns to Yale determined to make landmark achievements in cancer here. There are precedents. Yale was the first to use chemotherapy to treat cancer patients, and it was among the first centers designated as a comprehensive cancer center by the National Cancer Institute. Now Dr. Lynch plans to make it a leader in “personalized cancer therapy.” The plan is to deploy the expanded cancer resources in a highly individualized way, one patient at a time.  “Personalized medicine is about getting the right drug to the right patient and designing treatment based on both the patient’s underlying characteristics and the tumor’s underlying characteristics,” explained Dr. Lynch.

In his own work, Dr. Lynch has pioneered molecular profiling of lung cancer tumors to understand their mutations and development of drugs most effective on cancers with those specific mutations. The treatment is also guided by the patient’s general health and history. “The more information you have, the better your chances are to treat the cancer,” he said.

He’s working toward making molecular profiling standard care at Yale. Smilow Cancer Hospital at Yale-New Haven would be one of only a handful of cancer centers offering such individualized diagnosis. It would also set the stage for researchers and clinicians to collaborate on much more effective cancer treatments. The personalized approach offers the best hope for victories in the “War on Cancer,” a pledge to conquer the disease first made by President Richard Nixon in 1971 and newly affirmed by President Barack Obama.

“The therapeutics we have in 2009 are not enough,” said Dr. Lynch. Though cure rates have improved dramatically for some cancers, success against breast, colon, lung, or prostate cancers that have spread, has not increased much in four decades.

“If we don’t commit ourselves to clinical trials and we don’t commit ourselves to creating a culture of investigation and new drug development, we really have failed the public, and we’ve failed ourselves as doctors,” he said.

His first major task in New Haven is preparing to open the new 500,000-square-foot hospital in October. That involves moving clinical care now scattered throughout the medical center to a single location. While the logistics are considerable, Dr. Lynch said that the excellence of the oncologists already practicing at Yale is a tremendous asset to Smilow. “I wouldn’t have come if I didn’t think the physicians, nurses, and staff were the very best,” he said.

He will also devote himself to filling the West Campus with great scientists who are also great collaborators. In addition to the Cancer Biology Institute, the West Campus will house programs in cell biology, systems biology, infectious disease, and chemical genetics, all areas with implications for cancer care. “It’s probably the only place that is bringing in this many types of scientists all in one group,” said Dr. Lynch.

At Harvard, Dr. Lynch continued to see patients even as his administrative and research responsibilities grew. He hopes to do the same at Yale. “I’m fundamentally a physician, first and foremost,” he said.