Cancer Center director charts future based on collaboration, AI
New leader shares vision in The Cancer Letter, Cincinnati Business Courier
David Gius, MD, PhD, was featured in a Cincinnati Business Courier article and The Cancer Letter’s “The Directors" podcast discussing his priorities and goals after he recently took the helm as director of the University of Cincinnati Cancer Center.
Gius joined UC July 1 from the Mays Cancer Center, home to UT Health San Antonio MD Anderson Cancer Center, after a highly competitive national search. He brings his lab, two National Institutes of Health (NIH) R01 grants and two active clinical trials for women with high-risk breast cancer — adding significant research momentum to a Cancer Center already accelerating toward National Cancer Institute (NCI) designation.
Gius told the Business Courier he will prioritize encouraging more collaboration between Cancer Center experts in different disciplines and with other institutions.
"Almost all my high-impact publications include other laboratories. That’s something we need to foster here," he said. "...If you’re a thoughtful scientist, you don’t try to anticipate the results of an experiment; you let the results guide what you do next. And often that drives you into an area where you may not have expertise, and often it’s an area outside your comfort zone, so finding a partner to collaborate with is so important."
The Cancer Center will also continue to build its data science infrastructure, Gius told The Cancer Letter, using the latest technology to analyze clinical, basic science and clinical trial data. Researchers are already leveraging this technology in survivorship research programs.
"...Prevention covers a lot of ground, but one of the things we’re interested in here is prevention of toxicity, and we feel that that’s a real opportunity to use Big Data and AI-driven algorithms to try to identify those survivors who are more likely to have the long-term toxicity and side effects from therapy and intervening sooner," he said.
Watch, listen or read to The Directors podcast.
Read the Cincinnati Business Courier article.
Featured photo at top: David Gius, MD, PhD. Photo/Colleen Kelley/UC Foundation.
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