Podcast #11: From The OR To The Oval Office: A Conversation With Former NCI Director And FDA Commissioner Dr. Andrew Von Eschenbach
Perhaps no individual from the MD Anderson Cancer Center since its second president Charles LeMaistre served on the panel that identified the link between smoking and cancer, has had a bigger influence on national cancer policy and regulatory affairs than Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach.
Andy is a urologic cancer surgeon by training, a former chair of the Department of Urology at Anderson, and the first Chief Academic Officer in MD Anderson’s history. He was tapped by President George W. Bush to lead the National Cancer Institute where he brought a novel clinician’s eye to the cancer problem at an institute long dominated by basic research. With that vision, he articulated a goal of reducing suffering from cancer by putting the cancer patient at the center of all the government’s work on malignancy.
He was then tapped again by the White House to lead the Food and Drug Administration where he introduced innovative thinking about new drugs and devices and urged the agency’s leaders to integrate approaches to new drug and device approval as what was a drug and what was a device began to blur and traditional regulatory approaches were not going to be sufficient to get new therapies to desperate patients.
In this podcast, we ask Andy what he learned from each step in his career in medical leadership and what the future holds for the FDA even as the current administration shrinks the workforce there.
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