From the November 2017 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
ASTRO
ASTRO Gold Medal
ASTRO’s Gold Medal, first awarded in 1977, is bestowed annually on up to three ASTRO members who have made outstanding contributions to the field of radiation oncology, including work in research, clinical care, teaching and service. Including this year’s awardees, only 78 of ASTRO’s more than 10,000 members have received the Gold Medal award.
Candidates must be nominated by one active member of ASTRO and receive letters of support from two additional active members of ASTRO, detailing the nominee’s impact on the advancement of radiation oncology. Nominees may be from any of the scientific disciplines represented in ASTRO, including radiation oncology, biology and physics.
Søren M. Bentzen, DSc, Ph.D., is passionate about science and math. This passion has led to more than 400 published articles, approximately 1,400 scientific citations per year, more than 300 invited talks at international scientific meetings, 54 visiting professorships, 15 trial steering committee memberships and four clinical trial or research group chairmanships.
His nominating letters for the ASTRO Gold Medal contained descriptions of Bentzen like “leader in the field,” “one of the top scientists” and “preeminent researcher in the world.”
Bentzen is a professor and director of the Division of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore. He holds a secondary faculty appointment there as a professor of radiation oncology and is a member of the University of Maryland Marlene and Stewart Greenebaum Comprehensive Cancer Center.
After earning his doctorate in medicine and medical physics from the University of Aarhus in Denmark, Bentzen was a visiting scientist at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center from 1987–1988.
From there, he held appointments at the University of Aarhus, the Gray Laboratory and the University of Wisconsin before taking the post at the University of Maryland.
“I came into this field at a great time,” said Bentzen. “Radiation therapy has undergone quite a renaissance. The progress we’ve made in understanding radiation biology and molecular cancer biology has revolutionized the way radiation oncology is practiced.”
Bentzen has played a large role in that understanding. For years, he has studied the long-term effects of normal tissue toxicity as a result of radiation treatment. According to one nominating letter, “Søren’s work on normal tissue injury is probably the most important work of this type in the radiation oncology literature.”
This work led him to consider dose-fractionation schedules and how radiation therapy might be best tailored to maximize tumor control while minimizing toxicity to normal tissue. In another nominating letter, the writer concludes, “His work on modeling and fractionation have been essential to how we can use radiation safely in the clinic.”
Bentzen is focusing on a new frontier of cancer care: personalized medicine using big data to better tailor treatments. He said, “At the end of the day, it’s about optimizing the treatment for each individual. There are so many new possibilities that we didn’t have 15 years ago. With population-level registry data and electronic health records and then with what we know about genomics — combining data and knowledge across all of those fields is challenging and also very exciting.”
Louis B. Harrison, M.D., FASTRO, is a renaissance man of radiation oncology. From developing a customized high-dose-rate (HDR) radiation therapy applicator to writing a textbook to leading multidisciplinary teams, Harrison’s accomplishments in the field are varied and far-reaching.
Harrison began his medical career in surgery, receiving the Clarence Dennis Society Prize for Surgical Scholarship for the State University of New York (SUNY) Downstate College of Medicine’s class of 1982. But he soon switched paths to radiation oncology, saying, “I thought radiation oncology had the best opportunity for curing cancer while optimizing functional outcome and quality of life.”
