 
Bringing the future into focus Robert O'Donnell flirts with the future. A medical doctor with a Ph.D. in immunology and microbiology, this UC Davis faculty member fuses clinical care with cutting-edge research to treat patients with end-stage cancers that have failed to respond to every other available treatment. His innovative work represents their best hope of survival and portends a brighter future for those patients who will follow them. "My job is to develop new protocols and work up ideas for preclinical and clinical studies," said O'Donnell, an assistant professor in the Division of Hematology and Oncology at the UC Davis School of Medicine and Medical Center. Like many medical researchers at UC Davis, O'Donnell collaborates with colleagues from across campus and from many disciplines. These include renowned radioimmunology research pioneers Gerald DeNardo and Sally DeNardo, professors of radiology and internal medicine in the medical school; Claude Meares, professor and chair of the chemistry department in the College of Letters and Science; and others at the School of Veterinary Medicine and at the new Center for Comparative Medicine. "We are developing our own drugs," said O'Donnell, who earned his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois Medical Center in Chicago. "Working with mice, we test the drugs to see how well they are distributed throughout the body, and we determine their efficacy in arresting or reversing tumors. We do all this before we introduce them into humans."
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