AACR announces president-elect

Members of the American Association for Cancer Research selected José Baselga, MD, PhD, as the organization’s president elect for 2014-15.

Baselga, physician-in-chief at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, will officially become president-elect during the AACR Annual Meeting, scheduled for April 5-9 in San Diego. He will assume the association’s presidency in April 2015.

“These are both exciting and challenging times in the fight against cancer,” Baselga said in a press release. “Advances in our knowledge of cancer are resulting in the fulfillment of the promise of precision cancer medicine. Unprecedented breakthroughs are occurring in genomics, targeted therapeutics, and immunology, just to name a few. Together with the whole AACR community, I will push forward on multiple fronts — including regulatory science and policy, integration of basic and clinical research, and access of clinical trials to our patient population — with the clear mission of advancing progress in the prevention and treatment of cancer.”

Baselga’s research focuses on the clinical development of novel molecularly targeted agents for the treatment of cancer, particularly breast cancer. He conducted the first trial that demonstrated patients with advanced HER-2–positive disease benefitted from treatment with the anti–HER-2 monoclonal trastuzumab (Herceptin, Genentech), and he also led the clinical development of the anti–HER-2 monoclonal antibody pertuzumab (Perjeta, Genentech).

“Dr. Baselga is a distinguished clinical and translational cancer researcher who has brought a number of transformative breast cancer therapies to the clinic,” Margaret Foti, PhD, MD(hc), chief executive officer of AACR, said in a press release. “We are confident that his enormous experience in the development of molecularly targeted therapies and precision medicine will be invaluable as he leads the association toward its goal of defeating all cancers.”