Hirsch honored for lifetime contribution to cancer research
Fred R. Hirsch — professor, member of the University of Colorado Cancer Center and CEO of the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC) — has been awarded the Addario Foundation Lectureship Award by the Addario Lung Cancer Foundation (ALCF).
Hirsch was honored for his lifetime contribution to lung cancer research and his engagement in promoting international collaborations in lung cancer research and education. He has been involved in translational-clinical research in lung cancer since he was medical student in Copenhagen, Denmark. His Ph.D. thesis, which was partly done at the U.S. National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, included studies on heterogeneity in lung cancer, particularly small-cell lung cancer (SCLC), and broke ground in the understanding of lung cancer carcinogenesis. He has made significant contributions to the clinical development of etoposide in small-cell lung cancer, which remains the cornerstone of SCLC therapy.
Hirsch joined the Cancer Center in 1999 and focuses on development and validation of biomarkers for early detection and particularly on new targeted therapies in lung cancer in order to find the most optimal selection of patient populations to the different new drugs, mostly focused on EGFR inhibitors. Most recently, Hirsch was co-principal investigator (PI) for the clinical development of a new human antibody, necitumumab, for patients with squamous lung cancer.