Oncology, Etc. – In Conversation with Dr. Richard Pazdur (Part 1)

ASCO Education

In part one of this ASCO Education Podcast episode, director of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's Oncology Center of Excellence Dr. Richard Pazdur talks with hosts Dr. David Johnson and Dr. Patrick Loehrer about his upbringing in Indiana, his family, and his circuitous route to oncology. If you liked this episode, please subscribe. Learn more at https://education.asco.org, or email us at [e-mail].

TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Pat Loehrer: Hi, I’m Pat Loehrer. I'm the director of the Center of Global Oncology and Health Equity at Indiana University.

Dr. David Johnson: I'm Dave Johnson at UT Southwestern in Dallas, Texas. Pat, great to be back with another episode of Oncology, Etc, an ASCO educational podcast. We have a very special guest today, Dr. Richard Pazdur, from the FDA Oncology Center of Excellence.

I’m really looking forward to this conversation.

Dr. Pat Loehrer: This will be terrific.

Dr. David Johnson: Yeah. You were telling me before we got started about a little event that occurred this week, maybe you want to elaborate on that for us.

Dr. Pat Loehrer: Yeah, we always start out this by talking about books, and one of the books I'm drawn to today is a book called, The Emperor of All Maladies, which was written by Dr. Mukherjee several years ago.

I want to read a little bit from this because it has pertinence. This is about a guy named John Cleveland. Dr. Mukherjee writes, he goes, ‘In 1973 Cleveland was a 22-year-old veterinary student in Indiana. In August that year, two months after his marriage, he discovered a rapidly enlarging lump in his right testis. He was whisked off to the operating room for surgery and returned with a scar and he was diagnosed with metastatic testis cancer.

This was right around the time that Larry Einhorn came to Indiana University where he was treated with a three-drug cocktail of actinomycin-D, bleomycin, and oncovin ABO. And then he had a brief remission progressing and was treated with mithramycin mithrymicin.

And then in October of 1974, he once again developed progressive disease, and Larry approached him about a new cocktail with the drug cisplatin, that had never been used before in combination, and Larry's thought was to put it together with another couple of drugs.”

So, I'll just finish reading this. “In October 7, 1974, Cleveland took the gamble, he enrolled as patient zero for BVP, an acronym for the new regimen containing Bleomycin, Vinblastine and cisplatin. 10 days later, he returned for routine scans and the tumors in his lungs had vanished. He was ecstatic and mystified. He called his wife from the hospital phone. I can't remember what he said, but I told her the results.

So, John was the first one cured of testis cancer. Back then it was a 5% cure rate. Today, it's 95%. He is really the hero of heroes. Last week, at this time, John had asked me to come to his hospital room because he was diagnosed with metastatic cancer of a different type. He knew that this was basically the final hours of it. And so he wanted to say goodbye to me, and it was the most touching reunion I had.

Two days ago, John passed away. So, my thoughts are with him, especially his family. But also, when we think about heroes, John was one of them, and if it wasn't for him, and his first treatment, Larry might not have gone on and treated other patients with this regimen.

This drug cisplatin was experimental back then it caused a lot of nausea and vomiting and didn't work in many tumors, but this was a drug that was really highlighted and approved for the treatment of bladder cancer so Hubert Humphrey could get treated, and then in testis cancer, and it's really one the really success stories of all success stories in terms of oncology, and it started out with this experimental drug from the NCI that was approved by the FDA.”

So, this leads us to our guest today, Rick Pazdur who I've known for many years. He grew up in Calumet City, Illinois, which is famous as the home of the Blues Brothers and Rick Pazdur.

He got his bachelor’s degree from Northwestern, his medical degree from Loyola Stritch Medicine, and then did his hematology-oncology fellowship, initially his oncology fellowship at Rush Presbyterian St. Luke's, where I first met Rick, and then later finished his Heme-Onc fellowship at the University of Chicago.

From there, he went to Wayne State, served on the faculty there for about five or six years, and then joined the faculty at MD Anderson. He was there from 1988 to 1999. Then, we'd like to hear about this, but for some reason, it got in his head that he wanted to go to the FDA and so he moved to the FDA where he was Director of the Division of Oncology Drug Products, from 1999 to 2005, when they created the Office of Hematology Oncology Products, and he became the Director of this.

More recently, he's been made the director of the FDA's Oncology Center of Excellence. He still serves as the acting director for this OHOP. Rick is an extraordinary individual. He's been awarded a number of awards. From ASCO, he got the Service Recognition Award and the Public Service Award in 2013. And the AACR also awarded him the Public Service Award in 2015.

He's received numerous awards and he is probably one of the most respected oncologists that I know in this society. It's such a great pleasure to have you here today, Rick.

Dr. Richard Pazdur: My pleasure, Pat. My pleasure entirely. I look forward to the conversation.

Dr. David Johnson: Pat, you left out one award. He got so many awards that you can't list them all, but I was impressed that he got this award for the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center's – The 100 list.

Dr. Pat Loehrer: Yeah, we made the cut-off.

Dr. David Johnson: I have no idea what that is.

Dr. Pat Loehrer: We were on the 1001 list. We made that one. The only thing I want to throw into is that when I first met Rick, when I was a resident or an intern, I think, he was on the service with Phil Bonomi, who is very important for me for my thymoma research, but there was an oncology nurse on the service, Mary Lind, who was a terrific oncology nurse as they all are. But it turned out there was more chemistry that went on. So, Rick ended up marrying Mary, and I'm sure he'll tell some stories. We'll come back to that in a little bit, too.

Dr. David Johnson: Yeah, this is really exciting. So, let's get started. Rick, maybe you could tell us a little bit about your background and what got you into medicine in the early part of your career.

Dr. Richard Pazdur: I had an interesting story. Pat had mentioned Calumet City home as a Blues Brothers. That was the orphanage in the movie. It was located in Calumet City. But what you don't know about Calumet City is that the real kind of nickname for Calumet City in the 50s 60s 40s was 'Sin City'.

It has the honor of having the greatest number of liquor licenses in the United States. And in Calumet City, which was on the border of Hammond, Indiana, and Calumet City, they're kind of Sister Cities. They're one in Illinois, Calumet City. And Hammond is in Indiana, obviously, there was this strip, and it was called ‘The Strip’ and it had all of these bars and floor shows with Sally Rand and gambling.

If you walk down there, which I never did as a kid, but drove down there with my father some time just traversing the city, those lights were so bright, it was just like Las Vegas, basically.

So, you had that Strip and that went on for maybe three, four, or five blocks. And then you have the rest of the city that I grew up in, which was primarily a Polish Catholic city, which I am kind of a representative of being 100% polish. There were scattered bars throughout the city.

In fact, my fondest memory is sleeping in bed at 3 o'clock in the morning or 2 o'clock in the morning, awakening to people running out of a bar, which was 50 feet or 100 feet from my bedroom window. They were screaming and yelling and cursing and everything and throwing beer bottles at each other. And in those days, obviously, as you remember, in the 60s, there was no air conditioning. So, the bar was called The Tropical Inn. Let me tell you this, there was nothing tropical about it and there was nothing 'in' about it.

Dr. David Johnson: That background might have driven….

Dr. Richard Pazdur: That was not what I would call a highbrow area, but I enjoyed it. It was a fabulous childhood that I had. Most people don't know this. So, I will share this with you because it really had an indelible mark on my life and something that really transformed my childhood and my high school years and my college years, and my medical school years.

When I was about in seventh or eighth grade, my father who was basically a blue-collar factory worker, developed glaucoma, and he went blind at a very early age. And that threw the family into not only emotional turmoil but also economic turmoil.

I survived basically by getting Social Security dependent income and had to work at a very early age. I started as a dishwasher. My mother lied about my age so I could start working at a crummy restaurant in Calumet City as a dishwasher and I worked throughout school, but that experience really made me grow up really fast if I could say so.

You didn't have a childhood, you had to be responsible because there was really no security blanket to fall back on. Although my parents didn't have a lot of money, they really had very good emotional support for me and both my father and my mother came from very large, Polish families.

My mother had nine children in her family. She was right in the middle. And so, I had many cousins and many aunts and uncles and my father had seven children in his family and he was the oldest boy.

So, there was a lot of support there, but obviously not a lot of financial support. So, it really made me grow up relatively quickly and really come to some of life's lessons, relatively fast like discrimination against disabled people, which I will always remember.

When I was a boy, I remember going with my father walking and obviously he had a white cane, but walking down the street, people would actually cross the street to avoid us. They just didn't want to confront that anxiety. I don't know if it was discrimination or if they just felt uncomfortable dealing with it. When you go to a restaurant, people raise their voices, like the man was mentally impaired and that wasn't the case.

Dr. Pat Loehrer: I’m sorry to interrupt you just for a second because I read this somewhere and I think it's important to throw in. So, you graduated from high school in three years?

Dr. Richard Pazdur: Yes, that’s what I was gonna say. I graduated and I worked during that time also. These jobs were not like jobs that kids have now as consultants or internships, these were like real jobs as a janitor, a gardener, or a packer in a grocery store.

You had to do it and you had to compartmentalize your life to get things done, basically. But you were driven to do things and I'm thankful for that experience really. I even use it now when I'm facing turmoil in my life. I look back at that time and say to myself, Rick, if you did it then as a 12-year-old kid, a 14-year-old kid, you could do anything.

So, it really fostered a sense of responsibility, self-awareness, and the need to do things for yourself and get going on yourself. because nobody's going to help you in a sense. I’m very grateful for that.

Dr. David Johnson: Rick, at what point did you decide to become a physician? How did that experience really drive you into that field?

Dr. Richard Pazdur: Well, I spent a great deal of time in the lobby of the University of Chicago hospital with my father. I was the primary caregiver and went with him to his doctor's appointments. I can't tell you the number of hours I spent in the lobby of that hospital.

I was very interested in science. I was very interested in really helping people because of that background. I really had a great deal of clarity, though. I remember, when I was maybe a freshman or sophomore in high school, I wrote for the Northwestern Medical School catalog, because I thought I would be going to Northwestern undergraduate, I already decided in my own mind that that's where I wanted to go.

I just got their medical school catalog and I was thumbing through it, and I remember this vividly sitting on my bedroom floor next to the window that was 50 feet away from the bar, basically, and was looking through the medical school catalog and seeing all these names of this doctor, head of neurology, assistant professor, associate professor. I said, “Hell, if I'm going to be a doctor, I want to be one of these people. I want to be the best doctor. I want to be teaching the physician here and doing research.”

So, unlike most kids today that have to find themselves, like, ‘I'm going to take 8 years to complete college or something like that and take a year off to find myself.’ I had to be very, very focused on what I wanted to do.

So, I really worked very hard during it through time. I don't regret it, as I say. I went to Northwestern undergraduate and had a fantastic experience there. I graduated in three years as I mentioned. I had a special interest there that most people don't know about. The people at the FDA know about it. I did these pre-med courses but I had a really special interest in the field of sociology, and actually was toying with the idea if I didn't get into medical school to pursue a Ph.D. in Sociology and become an academic sociologist. If you remember and both of you are of this age.

Dr. Pat Loehrer: David is, not me.

Dr. Richard Pazdur: Okay. David might know of the Vietnam War. This was right around the time of Kent State and closing down the schools, I'm sure you remember that, for the colleges, etc.

Nobody went into business or anything like that. It was a sociology, psychology, and anthropology type of things people were interested in. My love was this field, and I did a lot of research on it.

I remember one of the professors that probably had the most influence on me, a woman called Zena Smith Blau, who was a sociologist, and I did multiple research projects and independent studies. The first thing when I took her first course, she assigned us a paper and she said, write about yourself, ‘What makes you unique?

I went to see her and I said, ‘I really don't know exactly what you mean by this.’ She said, ‘Well, how different are you?’ And I said, ‘Well, my parents are children of Polish immigrants, and I really know the Polish community in Chicago fairly well.’ She said, ‘That's it Rick, that's what your specialty will be.’

I did multiple research projects on this area with her. Some of them were like the assimilation of Polish immigrants with regard to urban-rural origin. Another one was working-class youth in Chicago, and mobility based on education and high school part-time employment. So, that was a fantastic experience that is totally outside of what I did in my future.

Dr. David Johnson: We asked our listeners to submit questions because we knew you were coming on. We did get a question that perhaps is appropriate to ask at this time. It comes from a younger trainee, who wants to know what advice you would give to a trainee aspiring to have a clinical investigative career in oncology? What sort of preparation should they have?

Obviously, you've got to learn all of the techniques of clinical trial designs, statistics, etc. But what other advice would you give a trainee hoping to pursue a career in clinical investigation?

Dr. Richard Pazdur: I think one's career always has to go back to the basics and have a patient focus. So, what is your interest in the patient, so to speak? And that is what advice I would give them.

Are you interested in a supportive care issue? Are you interested in a specific disease? I think you have to follow a passion and that is what is most important to me. What is your passion in life? Because as physicians, we spend a great deal of time preparing for our careers and then subsequently afterward, in our designated careers, and you really can't approach this as a job. It has to be a passion.

So, if you do have this, what are the questions that you really want to answer? What is the field that you want to go into and make an indelible mark in? So, that's what I come from, and that's something that I tell our staff is: what do you really want to do? What makes you happy? What would make you a success in your mind? Not defining yourself by somebody else.

Dr. Pat Loehrer: Finish the story a little bit. Was it a patient then that turned you on to oncology? What brought you into oncology?

Dr. Richard Pazdur: I had a very circuitous circular route to oncology. Oh my God! I don't know if you have enough time to hear this story, but let me start though.

I originally went to medical school because of my background in sociology. I wanted to become a psychiatrist because here again, I thought psychiatry, sociology, and psychology, these are kinds of things I was interested in until I took my first rotation in psychiatry. It was nothing like I thought it was going to be. I saw my first patient that got ECT (Electroconvulsive Therapy) and I said, 'I ain't doing this.'

So, I was then interested in cardiology. Loyola at that time where I was going to medical school and where I did my internship and residency, had a huge cardiology program that was like CAST city, USA. Everybody was just coming into the hospital getting CAST and going out of the hospital.

Dr. Pat Loehrer: [Unintelligible 18:13] was there, right?

Dr. Richard Pazdur: Yes. Mary Kate [Unintelligible 18:18]'s father was the head of medicine there. And it had a huge cardiology program and an excellent cardiology program. I really did like Clinical Oncology, and I was all signed up for a cardiology fellowship, the Ts were crossed, the dots were placed, the contract signed, and everything.

And somebody said, ‘Rick, why don't you take a rotation while you're a resident in the cath lab? We have an opening and this would be a great time and opportunity for you to jumpstart your fellowship. So, you can come and work for us in the middle of your third year of residency for about two or three months.’

So, I did that and I hated it. I just dreaded it. I couldn't stand it. It was the most boring thing. I would think of every opportunity to escape the Cath lab. It was the same thing over and over and over again, inject the dye, turn on the [Unintelligible19:16] machine, and follow the coronary arteries.

So, I happened to go to a community hospital, St. Francis in Evanston, Illinois, and I met an oncologist there that had just finished her fellowship. I really was very impressed by her clinical skills. She had finished her fellowship at the University of Chicago and worked with her there and was just amazed by really the quality of care that the oncologist gave patients with cancer.

Previous to that, I had an interest also in oncology. At Loyola at that time, we had an oncologist his name was Ketty Badrinath, and he was an excellent clinical teacher.

Now that I decided that I'm not going into cardiology, the first problem I have is to find a job and to find a fellowship in oncology. So, I started investigating oncology programs at St. Francis Hospital there. I went down to the gift shop and I said, I want $10 worth of quarters. I went to a payphone, closed the door of the payphone, dialed information, and got every oncology program that I could think of from Mayo Clinic to all of the programs in Chicago.

One of my last phone calls was to Rush Presbyterian. I found that program director, Jules Harris, I don't know if you remember him, and he said, “We have an opening.” So, I accepted the position.

At the end of June, whatever it was, June 27, 1979. I started my oncology fellowship program. Now Oncology at that time in Chicago, to give you a picture of it, the largest program in oncology was at Rush. It had a total of 12 people. And the therapy started at Rush around solid tumors really in the endocrine therapies of prostate cancer and breast cancer.

So, it was a different program than most programs throughout the United States that were offshoots of Hematology programs and the treatment of acute leukemia and lymphomas. So, it had a really kind of different orientation.

So, I started my fellowship. And on the first day, I met Phil Bonomi, who had a tremendous influence and still has an influence over me. I know no doctor that I respect most more than Phil. I think the greatest compliment that one could give a doctor is to refer your own family to him. And I've done it on numerous occasions with various cousins and aunts and uncles, etc.

But as you mentioned, Pat, I also had the opportunity to meet my wife. And I met her and at first, we were very good friends and there was no romantic relationship. And then, as time proceeded, we knew that there was something special there. My wife was just a wonderful person.

Like myself, my wife was pretty much a self-made person. She was one of eight children, the oldest daughter. As the oldest daughter, she had to assume a lot of childcare responsibilities, cooking, etc, for all of her brothers and sisters and took care of the younger children. But she was an excellent student. She graduated first in her class. She was a national merit finalist.

I often asked my wife, ‘Mary, you're a nurse, are you interested in going into medicine? I'll be happy to work with you to get you into medical school.’ And she said, ‘No, you want to go into medicine, I want to go into nursing.’

That was her orientation toward other people. It wasn't about the buck. It wasn't about the title. It was about the work of helping other people. I really have to honor her mother and father who gave her that orientation. Of interest, all of her sisters are nurses. Her mother was actually a school nurse, and an original graduate of Rush. She went to Rush Nursing School in the 50s but had to leave because at that time in the 1950s, if you got married, you can't be in nursing school, they kicked you out. So, it shows you how times have changed.

Dr. Pat Loehrer: Well, this concludes part one of our interview with Dr. Richard Pazdur who is the director of the US Food and Drug Administration's Oncology Center of Excellence.

Stay tuned for part two of this conversation where we'll hear how cancer has touched his life personally and will explore the initiatives and programs, he started to improve patient care globally.

Thank you to all of our listeners for tuning into Oncology, Etc. This is an ASCO education podcast where we'll talk about just about everything and anything. If you have an idea for a topic or guests you'd like to see on the show, please email us at [e-mail]. Have a good week.

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