Notice the trademark symbol every time MD Anderson mentions "making cancer history (R)?" This is because it wants to block other medical centers, academic institutions, and research universities from using this phrase. With an operating budget of four billion U.S. dollars, the MD Anderson health care enterprise is asserting that it alone will be "making cancer history (R)." From a legal prospective, no one else can claim to be "making cancer history (R)."
For now, let us put aside the obvious question of what would happen to MD Anderson if cancer were history, and let us examine the evidence of how committed MD Anderson is to cancer research.
1. In fiscal year 2017, MD Anderson allocated ~6% to research. (Operating budget reports are available on MD Anderson's website and these reports are discoverable by Google.)
2. MD Anderson still does not have a Chief Scientific Officer (an powerless ad interim officer is serving temporarily). A number of research departments are also without a Chair, because the former Chairs have moved on to greener pasture. There has been a mass exodus of faculty scientists from research departments and MD Anderson has only approved faculty searches for a small fraction of these vacant positions. The ranks of research scientists are dwindling at MD Anderson.
3. Faced with the mass exodus of scientists, instead of changing its environment and culture to better support research, MD Anderson resorts to alternative means to obstruct (well-funded) scientists from leaving, such as using spyware to monitor scientists' activities on the computers (Read the article on Keping Xie's in the Houston Chronicle published Feb 5, 2019.) For other scientists contemplating on moving to other U.S. research institutions, MD Anderson threatens to block these scientists from taking their grant money with them. Additionally, a number of foreign scientists are or have been under unfounded investigations for espionage. It is hard to imagine that scientists would do their best work under such a tangibly hostile environment.
4. On the ground, morale is low. Only an insignificant minority of MD Anderson scientists work after hours or on the weekends.
5. Wait. James Allison was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (shared with Tasuku Honjo), and Dr. Allison is currently at MD Anderson, so this is sign that MD Anderson fosters a supportive research environment, right?
In reality, Dr. Allison's seminal work on CTLA4 published in 1996 was conducted at the University of California, Berkeley (1985 - 2004), and he continued this work at Memorial Sloan-Kettering (2006-2012) and Weil Cornell (2004-2012). The first translational success resulting in the Ipilimumab therapeutic was published in 2010 (N Engl J Med 2010; 363:711-723). Dr. Allison joined MD Anderson in 2012. This temporal sequence of events therefore fails to support the tenuous proposition that MD Anderson played a pivotal in fostering Dr. Allison's scientific success.
