From the December 2016 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
Dr. Christopher G. Willett
He has served as director for clinical research and numerous other leadership roles with the Duke Cancer Institute. Under his leadership at Duke, the department’s clinical and physics faculty has doubled. He has developed a comprehensive division of medical physics, including a graduate program. And the clinical services have expanded to seven facilities in North Carolina and Virginia. Willett also established a department-supported clinical trial recruitment program that accrues 150 to 180 patients each year to investigator-initiated trials. Before his move to North Carolina, Willett rose from assistant to full professor of radiation oncology at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Harvard Medical School in Boston in just over a decade. While at Harvard, Willett also served as director of the Gastrointestinal Cancer Center and clinical director of radiation oncology at MGH and began his extensive involvement with the Radiation Therapy Oncology Group (RTOG).
In a span of nearly 30 years he has served as chair of the RTOG Gastrointestinal Cancer Committee and investigator for a number of trials in gastrointestinal malignancy. Willett’s contributions to clinical and translational research are many, whether pioneering intraoperative radiation therapy (IORT) to treat rectal and pancreatic cancers or demonstrating the potential of RT combined with anti-angiogenic therapy to fight a range of cancer types. For example, in 2004 he published a Nature Medicine article that has been cited more than 1,800 times, reporting an innovative trial combining preoperative RT and fluorouracil together with the anti-angiogenic antibody bevacizumab.
Willett’s relationship with ASTRO began during his medical training at MGH, when he won the Society’s annual Resident Essay Award. He has represented ASTRO as chair of both the steering and scientific program committees for the multidisciplinary Gastrointestinal Cancer Symposium, and was named an ASTRO Fellow in 2011. Willett also spent several years as a senior editor focused on GI cancer for ASTRO’s International Journal of Radiation Oncology • Biology • Physics (Red Journal).
