Spotlight On….

Scott M. Lippman, MD, has devoted a large part of his time over the last 25 years to trying to prevent cancer. His worldwide recognition for this work includes receiving the 2005 American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Cancer Research and Prevention Foundation Award for Excellence in Cancer Prevention Research. In announcing this award, AACR Chief Executive Officer Margaret Foti, PhD, MD, said, “Dr. Lippman is well recognized as one of the leading physician-scientists in cancer research today. His translational studies, from laboratory research to patient testing in clinical trials, have uncovered new means of treating and preventing several different types of cancer. His prominence in the field is evidenced by the leadership positions he has held in a number of National Cancer Institute (NCI) prevention studies.”

Scott resides with his wife and three children in Houston, Texas, where he holds the Charles A. LeMaistre Distinguished Chair in Thoracic Oncology and became, as of January 1, 2006, chairman of the Department of Thoracic/Head and Neck Medical Oncolgy after serving for 10 years as chairman of the Department of Clinical Cancer Prevention at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

He is among the first physician-scientists to translate molecular discoveries into targeted cancer chemoprevention trials. His studies include the biology of carcinogenesis and the targets and mechanisms for potential chemopreventive agents. Major emphases of his current work are to identify high-risk populations and to develop molecular targeted drugs for preventing cancer in these people.

Scott has long helped pioneer research in oral cancer prevention, and this work is a major reason he currently believes that cancer prevention is converging with cancer treatment. High-risk premalignant lesions share many molecular characteristics with early-stage cancer, and therapeutic drugs can have molecular targets in both premalignancy and malignancy. The cancer prevention-therapy convergence is illustrated by his current translational work in patients with the precancerous condition oral leukoplakia (white patches in the mouth) who are at a high risk of oral cancer because of either allelic imbalance or aneuploidy. These patients’ risk of developing oral cancer can reach up to 70% within three years. A trial under development will test a novel molecular targeted approach for preventing or delaying oral cancer in these high-risk patients.

Scott also is recognized for his laboratory group’s exciting record of molecular targeting discoveries within colorectal carcinogenesis. His group has discovered a pathway that signals apoptosis (programmed cell death) through the regulation of 15-lipoxygenase-1 (15-LOX-1), an enzyme that metabolizes polyunsaturated fatty acids. The promise of what are commonly called selective COX-2-inhibiting nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), as he has discovered, lies not only in inhibiting COX-2 but also largely in the ability of NSAIDs to induce apoptosis and inhibit tumorigenesis via upregulating 15-LOX-1 in colorectal cancer cells.

He led the design of the ongoing NCI Selenium and Vitamin E [prostate] Cancer Prevention Trial (SELECT), an effort that utilized his group’s important in vitro findings that selenium inhibits growth and induces apoptosis selectively in malignant versus normal prostate cells. Scott is also principal investigator of the NCI program project “Biology of the Prostate Cancer Prevention Trial (PCPT),” which promises new insights into the risks of and mechanisms underlying overall and high-grade prostate cancer development and into the ability of the 5α-reductase inhibitor finasteride to prevent prostate cancer. Scott and collaborators at Cornell and Columbia universities, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and other centers are working on several NCI N01 phase I and II translational trials of new agents for cancer prevention.

In addition to his other work, Scott chairs or serves on important American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), AACR, Southwest Oncology Group (SWOG), and NCI committees and meeting faculties. He recently served on the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee (ODAC) and currently sits on the editorial boards of several top peer-reviewed journals including Cancer Research (Senior Editor), Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Journal of Clinical Oncology, Clinical Cancer Research, and Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention. He was guest editor of a special edition of the Journal of Clinical Oncology devoted to cancer prevention and published in January 2005. In 2006, he will chair the Frontiers in Cancer Prevention meeting of the AACR in Boston and the Keystone Symposium Molecular Targets for Cancer Prevention in Tahoe City, California.

Scott received a BS from the University of California, Irvine, and received his MD from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He then completed internal medicine training at the Johns Hopkins Hospital (internship) and Harbor-UCLA Medical Center (residency), followed by fellowships in hematology at Stanford University School of Medicine and in medical oncology and cancer prevention and control at the University of Arizona Cancer Center. He is triple-Board certified in internal medicine, hematology, and medical oncology.