Giants of Cancer Care® Program Inductees
Radiation Oncology
Ralph R. Weichselbaum, MD
Daniel K. Ludwig Distinguished Service Professor of Radiation and Cellular Oncology
Chair of the Department of Radiation and Cellular Oncology
Co-Director of the Ludwig Center for Metastasis Research
Committee on Cancer Biology
Committee on Clinical Pharmacology and Pharmacogenomics
University of Chicago
- With Samuel Hellman, MD, FASTRO, he established the term “oligometastasis” and proposed it as “a spectrum of disease from purely localized to widespread.”
- He is editor of Cancer Medicine.
- He invented a radio-inducible form of gene therapy TNFerade, which is in clinical trials currently.
- He defined the role of potentially lethal radiation damage in human tumor cells and the role of a type of DNA repair in radiotherapy.
- He contributed to the concepts underlying TVEC, an HSV-1 vector that is now in clinical use in melanoma.
- Findings he worked on with colleagues have:
- Demonstrated that Type 1 interferon signaling is required for radiation to be effective
- Demonstrated that blockade of the PD-L1 ligand for the checkpoint inhibitor PD-1 increases both the local and abscopal effects of radiotherapy
- He has developed the basis of a microRNA classifier to identify patients with oligometastatic disease who are more likely to be cured.
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