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About the Author

Richard Van Etten, MD

Richard Van Etten, MD, PhD, is the director of the UCI Health Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center at UC Irvine Medical Center.

After completing a combined medical and doctoral degree program at Stanford University, he spent three years as a post-doctoral fellow in David Baltimore’s lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

His research there inspired the discovery of a drug that thwarted the action of an abnormal protein. That drug is Gleevec, a miracle pill that transformed chronic myeloid leukemia into a controllable illness. Virtually overnight, five-year survival rates jumped from 30 percent to nearly 90 percent, as long as those affected took daily doses of the pills. This breakthrough drug helped pave the way for the targeted treatments of today.

Van Etten has authored more than 140 scientific articles, reviews and book chapters. He was named a Stohlman Scholar of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society in 2003. He also is a recipient of the 2008 Zucker Family Research Prize at Tufts University School of Medicine and the 2015 Janet Rowley Prize from the International CML Foundation.

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