Building on basics

NCI Designation Achieved
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DeVere White is professor and chair of urology at UC Davis School of Medicine and Medical Center. At the national level, he chairs the U.S. Department of Defense Integrated Panel for Prostate Cancer Research Program (an advisory body that helps to administer $85 million annually in federal grants for prostate cancer), serves as editor of The World Journal of Urology and sits on the editorial boards of four other scientific journals. He is past president of the Urological Research Society, and past chair of the Southwest Oncology Group’s Applied Basic Research Committee. (Sponsored by the NCI, SWOG is one of the largest adult cancer clinical trials organizations in the world). Over the past 30 years, he has authored more than 200 scientific articles and book chapters and edited three medical texts. In addition, he has been named three times as one of “The Best Doctors in America,” most recently for the year 2002.

DeVere White’s prostate cancer research program, currently supported by two NCI research grants, focuses on understanding the genetic mistakes that give rise to prostate cancer. He is interested too in the molecular mechanisms that make some prostate cancers more virulent than others (see “Prostate Progress” on p. 16), and in new methods of diagnosing and treating prostate, bladder and other urologic cancers (see “A Better Way to Treat Bladder Cancer?” on p. 7).

One of deVere White’s first acts as director of the UC Davis Cancer Center was to recruit Jeanine Stiles from UCLA to serve as the center’s administrator. Her efforts were invaluable in the preparation of a formal proposal for NCI designation, and in the challenging review period that followed.

Also critical to winning NCI designation was the recruitment of Hsing-Jien Kung to serve as deputy director of the cancer center and associate director for basic science. Kung joined UC Davis in 1988 from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, where he held an endowed professorship in cancer research. Kung’s reputation and expertise — he is internationally recognized for his contributions in the areas of signal transduction, tyrosine kinases and cancer virology — helped the cancer center recruit other outstanding cancer researchers, among them Kit Lam, who discovered a rapid method of creating and testing potential new anti-cancer drugs, and Ron Wisdom, an accomplished investigator in the areas of oncogenes and transcriptional factors, who brings this research to bear on the problem of breast cancer.

With other cancer center leaders, Kung went to work organizing campuswide cancer research efforts into an efficient machine for bringing new ideas into the clinic. The breadth of these efforts, by scientists from more than a dozen disciplines, helped set UC Davis Cancer Center’s bid for NCI designation apart.