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SAMUEL WAXMAN Cancer Research Foundation By Peter Elston
T
he Samuel Waxman Cancer Research Foundation (SWCRF), an international nonprofit organization that funds cuttingedge cancer research, today announced that its founder and CEO, Samuel Wax-man, M.D. received China’s highest honor granted to a foreigner. The Vice-Premier of the People’s Republic of China, Liu He, presented the “Friendship Award,” to Dr. Waxman at a ceremony in Bei-jing over the weekend. The award was established in China in 1991, and is conferred annually to foreign civilians who have made significant contributions to the country’s “national development.” This year, more than 50 individuals from more than 20 countries were presented with the Friendship Award and included experts in healthcare, engineering, and education. More than 30 years ago, just as the United States and China governments began normalizing relations, Dr. Waxman started a collaboration with investigators at China’s cancer research universities and institutions including Shanghai Second Medical University, and Ruijin Hospital Shanghai Insti-tute of Hematology (SIH). “The SWCRF established a collaboration between my laboratory at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Shanghai-based scientists who previously had minimal contact with Western medi-cine. The SWCRF provided funding to train these scientists who then returned to China and be-came leading clinical investigators,” said Dr. Waxman. “The SWCRF also provided new laboratory equipment and materials, and upgraded the leukemia treatment facilities that became the Shang-hai Institute of Hematology.”
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Dr. Waxman and China-based investigators focused on researching leukemia and would achieve two significant breakthroughs that indelibly changed the outcome for thousands of patients diagnosed annually with acute promyelocytic leukemia (APL), a once devastating subtype of acute myeloid leukemia (AML). “One of our first landmark achievements was reported in a western journal in 1988 and was the first example of successfully using differentiation therapy as an emerging form of treatment for some cancers that was less toxic and more effective,” said Dr. Waxman. “Differentiation therapy started in my laboratory with the idea that it was possible to reverse the abnormal growth and function of a cancer cell, an idea that was radically distinctive from the conventional wisdom and treatments at the time.”
entiation Therapy took it from proof of principle to the standard treatment for APL. It was once a fatal disease, and now more than 95 percent of patients are cured through Differentiation Therapy. “This treatment is now standard throughout the world and can be considered a major achievement resulting from Chinese investigators working in collaboration with scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Today investigators with the Shanghai Institute of Hematology continue to ex-change research with thirty investigators across the world within the SWCRF Institute Without Walls,” said Dr. Waxman.
Although Dr. Waxman was a collaborator on the research, he elected to omit his name from the journal article since he wanted it to be a first allChinese landmark article to be published. “They looked at that as a very unusual gesture of a collaborator and more as a friend,” Dr. Waxman said.
The SWCRF Institute Without Walls™ and Partnership for Aging and Cancer program are currently funding research of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) with investigators at the Icahn School of Medi-cine at Mount Sinai, Shanghai Institute of Hematology, and Shenyang Pharmaceutical University. AML is the most common form of leukemia that afflicts primarily older adults. SWCRF is also collab-orating with the Shenyang Pharmaceutical University to develop a cancer drug to treat AML.
Later, Dr. Waxman and the SWCRF established its Institute Without Walls™ to drive further collaboration with scientists in China, United States and Europe. One such partnership involved a 10-year research program funded by the National Institutes of Health, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Dr. Waxman was named Honorary Professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and received the Mag-nolia Award from the city of Shanghai. Currently, he is a Distinguished Service Professor, at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and continues to lead research on behalf of the SWCRF and serves as the foundation’s chief executive officer.
The collaboration between the SWCRF and labs in Shanghai for researching and developing Differ-
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