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Stephen M. Ansell, MD, PhD: Translational scientist at heart
Stephen M. Ansell, MD, PhD, is professor of medicine at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. He is chair of the Mayo Clinic Lymphoma Group and chair of the scientific advisory committee of the International Waldenstrom’s Macroglobulinemia Foundation. Ansell also is a member of the HemOnc Today Editorial Board. His research interests include understanding the biology of B-cell malignancies and exploring the role of the tumor microenvironment in supporting cancer cell growth and survival.
Question: What inspired you to go into medicine?
Answer: When I was in high school, I had an opportunity to work with a veterinary scientist who was doing research. I enjoyed some of the investigational things that he was doing and I thought it would be very interesting to go into research. It was recommended that I go to medical school first and then do research afterward. This ended up being really good advice and, after I was done with medical school, I ended up doing oncology and participating in clinical trials. This exposed me to both the translational and clinical side of hematology and oncology. Since then, I have tried be a translational scientist. I think getting a taste for the experimental side of things and a taste for the clinical side of things got me interested in trying to do both.
Q: What is your greatest professional reward?
A: Nothing gives me greater satisfaction than seeing a patient benefit from a therapy that we are developing or are participating in, particularly when basic research predicted it would be helpful and the clinical results confirm that. Most recently, one of the areas that we have done a lot of work in is the use of PD-1 blockade in Hodgkin lymphoma. I can remember one of the initial patients treated with an anti–PD-1 antibody right in the beginning of the first phase 1 trial. He was desperately sick from his disease but had an excellent response and certainly benefited from the therapy. Being able to say to myself ‘I told you so’ was very gratifying. It has been a delight to see people benefit from some of this translational work.
Q: What has been your greatest professional challenge?
A: Two things. One is that I have tried to position myself in the translational research space, and the challenge is that it is a very poorly defined research area. Everyone understands clinical or basic research well, but translational research is something that is less well defined. Because of that, it can be hard to continue to get adequate funding for translational work. This brings me to the second challenging aspect, which is that research funding is continually needed to keep things moving forward. It is hard to be able to look ahead and come up with novel research, because you have to spend a lot of time making sure that you have enough ‘gas in the engine’ to keep your lab workers paid.
Q: What do you think will have the biggest influence on hematology in the next 10 years?
A: These are very exciting times because we are working on understanding ways to be able to utilize the immune system in a more effective fashion than ever before. Exciting prospects include chimeric antigen receptor T cells, bi-specific antibodies and immune-checkpoint therapies. Understanding how to combine these therapies, and understanding what each of these modalities do to the immune system, is going to make the foreseeable future an exciting time. In the past, we have tried to utilize the immune system, but previous approaches were not very effective. Now, however, the efficacy of immune therapy has definitely stepped up, and I am hoping to see even more benefit in the future. Combining immune therapies with some of the more standard modalities, such as chemotherapy and pathway inhibitors, will result in unique combinations to hopefully cure more patients and more diseases than we ever have before.
Q: Whom do you consider your biggest mentor(s)?
A: I have been very blessed with a few key people helping me along the way. I grew up and trained in South Africa, where I worked under Geoffrey Falkson, MD, an oncologist who was the department head at University of Pretoria. He was very instrumental in getting me to be a part of clinical trials. He was a part of the ECOG cooperative group — in fact, the only site outside of the United States — so that got me interested in trials and in oncology in general. At Mayo Clinic, there have been a number of folks who really helped open doors for me. Thomas Habermann, MD, and Thomas Witzig, MD, were the previous chairs of the Mayo lymphoma group. Both were helpful in moving things forward for me. Also, one of the basic researchers at Mayo Clinic, Diane Jelinek, PhD, gave me some space in her lab and mentored me in the area of tumor immunology. These are all people who helped open doors for me.
Q: What brought you to the United States from South Africa?
A: I trained in oncology in South Africa and, right before I was going to take a faculty position there, I thought it would be good to come to the United States and do a fellowship here. I applied to a number of programs, and Mayo Clinic was very gracious to have me. The residency and fellowship programs gave me a number of great opportunities.
Q: What do you enjoy doing when you are not practicing medicine?
A: I think it is really important to have a few things that you like to do outside of your profession that are not medical. I like sports and play in an ‘old guys’ soccer league. We get out and kick the ball around and try not to do too much damage to each other. I also play tennis in a league with my wife, so that is another opportunity to get some exercise. I do like to travel and am fortunate to do as part of my job, so that aspect allows me to blend a hobby with my profession.
Q: If you had not gone into medicine, what would you have done?
A: When I was in middle school, I wanted to be a nuclear physicist because it just sounded extremely cool. I am not sure it was exactly what I wanted to do once I understood what they did. But, I have always liked science, so I would have done something scientific. However, I like people too, so it would need to be something at that included both.
Q: What is the best advice you have ever received?
A: I am not sure that it was advice, but I try not to take ‘no’ for an answer when it comes to science. In the world of science, when you are blocked at one area and do not find yourself progressing forward, you want to be able to keep pushing ahead, even if it seems as though the road is a ‘no.’ Sometimes new and novel things are found by tenacity.
Q: What is your favorite travel destination?
A: There are so many wonderful places around the world. I think the place where I had the most fantastic experience was Machu Picchu in Peru.
Q: What genre of music do you listen to the most?
A: I guess I am somewhat old school. I enjoy music from Sting and others in that genre. – by Jennifer Southall