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Community Corner

The Future of Cancer Therapy

I recently had the honor of interviewing a truly inspirational physician, Dr Jonathan Lewis. A Fairfield County resident, Dr Lewis is CEO of Ziopharm, a company leading the way in the fight against cancer with state of the art biomedical techniques, and the nobel aim to create effective, affordable cancer treatments.


We began our conversation by talking about the disappointingly slow but steady decline in cancer mortality rates in the last 20 years. Dr Lewis urged optimism saying “we are entering a golden age in research”, where innovation will come more rapid. He spoke of the need to “industrialize” medical research, just like Ford did with the car industry over 100 years ago. His vision is that synthetic biology, DNA technology and better understanding of the complex, unpredictable nature of cancer itself, will lead to the ability to design, test and “build” new treatments faster than ever before and ultimately reduce costs and improve patient outcomes.


As a Public Health Doctor, it always struck me that the old way of medical research, with thousands of researchers hidden away in secret labs not sharing their findings, was a great waste of resources and wisdom. Dr Lewis and Ziopharm are leading the way, with a refreshing approach to cancer research; collaboration with biotech and pharmaceutical companies, universities and governments. All of which will lead to better drugs, coming to market in quicker timescales: beneficial to patients, government and investors in this new breed of Biotech company.

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Dr Lewis talked about disruptions in the status quo within medicine; from public health campaigns in the UK which pay people to stop smoking and to lose weight to the creation of a new breed of patients as empowered consumers, demanding more information and choice.  Ziopharm’s collaborative approach aims to improve patient access to effective cancer treatment, with lower costs and community-based therapy, which there is no doubt will benefit all.


Ziopharm has a deep domain knowledge of cancer, drugs for brain cancer, breast cancer and melanoma, in various stages of development. Synthetic Biology, according to Dr Lewis is evolving fast. One of the recent developments is the extraordinary ability to switch parts of genes on and off: Take pill A – turn on the gene, stop pill A or take pill B – turn the gene off.  Practically this means that if a patient is beginning to experience significant toxicity, the effects of treatment can be reversed quickly.

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South African born Lewis is an extraordinarily accomplished surgeon, has trained in South Africa, the UK and US, gaining his Ph.D. at Yale and working for many years at New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, where he became a professor. Despite his work taking him all over the world, home for Lewis has been in Fairfield County for 15 years and he has lectured locally on many occasions at Yale Medical and Business schools.


We ended our discussion with two topics close to my heart: persistence in the face of adversity and disease prevention. Being a physician, like other extreme jobs, such as the marines, takes a person to the world’s darkest places, ultimately creating resilient, persistent people. Prevention of illness, is essential in our society, yet often overlooked. Treating chronic illness like cancer and diabetes has financial costs to the individual, government and society. But it is the human cost of chronic disease that is most pressing. It is much more efficient in all measures, to prevent illness than to treat it.


My interview with Dr Lewis left my brain whirring with hope and ideas. Ziopharm and Dr Lewis’s vision of affordable, targeted cancer treatments with fewer side effects is indeed an exciting proposition: to current and future patients, to society and to investors.  
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