Cancer Program Head Is Prevention Pioneer : Medicine: Dr. Frank Meyskens has made UCI a leader in an emerging field of research.
Ahead of his time a decade ago when he studied the cancer preventive powers of vitamin A, Dr. Frank L. Meyskens Jr. remembers with mischievous delight a talk he gave back then to a group of cancer therapists.
“At the end of the talk, one guy in all innocence says, ‘You’re doing this prevention stuff until we have a cure, right?’ ” he recalled. “I said, ‘No, wrong. My intention is to put you out of business.’ ”
Now the head of UC Irvine’s cancer program, the 48-year-old Meyskens has made the university a leader in the emerging field of cancer prevention research.
Dr. Peter Greenwald, director of cancer prevention and control at the National Cancer Institute in Maryland, calls Meyskens “a real visionary” who has risked the less traveled road.
While mainline medicine was using toxic chemotherapy to treat cancer, Meyskens bet his scientific reputation that more benign chemicals--some naturally occurring like vitamin A--might prevent cancer by stopping or reversing molecular changes that lead to the disease.
His faith in chemoprevention has begun to be confirmed by research studies.
Most recently, the Journal of the National Cancer Institute in April published the results of a 15-year study, of which Meyskens was the principal author, that showed a drug similar to vitamin A can reverse precancerous conditions of the cervix.
But last week, Meyskens’ scientific acclaim was overshadowed by news that, under his leadership, UCI is on the verge of obtaining special recognition by the National Cancer Institute that would make it one of the top five cancer centers in Southern California.
By summer’s end, UCI will probably become an NCI “clinical cancer center,” a designation that may bring up to $2.4 million in federal grant money to the university over three years and enable it to attract more cancer researchers, physicians and patients seeking state-of-the-art medicine.
The prestigious designation is a necessary step toward UCI’s ultimate goal of becoming an NCI “comprehensive cancer center,” which would give it even loftier status among scientists.
A workaholic who needs little sleep, he works some 70 hours a week on his multifaceted job, according to his staff, dividing his time between administrative tasks, teaching, research and patients.
Meyskens, who rises at 4 a.m., confesses to having slowed his pace a tad since a sudden attack of diabetes last summer sent him to the intensive care unit at UCI Medical Center. After that scare, he started taking insulin, monitoring his sugar level and wearing a medic alert bracelet.
The bulk of the credit for UCI’s fast track admission to the NCI cancer pantheon goes to Meyskens, who was recruited from the University of Arizona five years ago to develop an NCI-class cancer center, colleagues say.
Despite the plaudits, Carol Schwartz, Meyskens’ secretary, said that when friends stop to congratulate him, he refuses the compliments.
“He is one of the most humble individuals I have seen in my life,” she said.
And his preoccupation with intellectual pursuits and lack of pretentiousness, friends say, are evidenced by his rumpled look. Meyskens, who earns $250,000 a year at UCI, attributes his inattention to clothes to his blue-collar background as “the son of a plumber.”
By contrast, friends say, his mind is sharp and he has a voracious appetite for scientific reading. “Only a handful of people in the country know as much about cancer prevention,” said Dr. Thomas Ahlering, a urological oncologist whom Meyskens recruited to UCI from the City of Hope National Medical Center. “He is not driven by fame or finances. He seems driven by the scientific endeavor.”
Meyskens has the rare ability to communicate as clearly to a scientific gathering as to a group of Leisure World retirees, Schwartz said.
Similarly, Meyskens speaks the professional lingos of both medicine and basic research, a skill that has helped him bridge the gap that once separated UCI physicians from scientists. Retreats have been his favorite tools to bring the two groups together to share ideas.
“He encouraged people to talk and work together, to become a center,” said Hoda Anton-Culver, director of cancer epidemiology intervention, a component of the center. “Before, each investigator worked by himself.”
Such cooperation was important to gaining recognition from the NCI, which insists that its centers develop interdisciplinary research programs that transfer laboratory research into clinical trials.
When Meyskens arrived at UCI, he found that basic biological and molecular research was strong but clinical research was not a high priority for its physicians. That is changing. While clinicians were receiving only $192,000 a year in research grants five years ago, they are now garnering about $2 million a year.
The campus now has one of the nation’s most ambitious clinical cancer research programs in chemoprevention, studying how chemicals--such as vitamin A, beta carotene and tamoxifen--protect people at high risk for various forms of cancer.
He also recruited leading research talent to UCI. Among the biggest coups were Ahlering, Dr. Jeffrey Webber, formerly a senior investigator at the National Cancer Institute, and Dr. Paul Zeltzer, a pediatric oncologist from UCLA.
Meyskens also promoted fund-raising to support the cancer program, which has raised $26 million, the most since he arrived.
“He wanted to increase the visibility of the cancer program in the community,” said Ann Siemens, the cancer program’s director of development. “He got our doctors, nurses and basic researchers talking to traditional donors and even patients who became donors.”
All this was done with little fanfare by the unassuming man who hung the sign “grantmaster,” a present from his three children, inside his office door so it would not offend anyone.
“As a director, you really have to bury your ego as much as possible and put everyone else out front,” he said.
Meyskens became interested in medicine as a child, having been born with an incapacitating brain disorder that caused him to suffer severe seizures.
“I spent a good portion of my life between the ages of 3 and 10 in the hospital,” he said. “My earliest childhood memory was sitting in bed with all these white coats around me with my mother crying in the corner.”
Meyskens ultimately outgrew this medical problem, but the confinement encouraged him to turn to books and science.
He attended UC San Francisco Medical School and during a 1968 summer job at the University of Cambridge met Francis Crick, a co-discoverer of DNA. The relationship ignited his interest in microbiology.
After training at the National Cancer Institute, he took a position at the University of Arizona in 1977, where he organized cancer prevention studies. He also played a role in that school’s developing its NCI cancer center in the 1980s.
Best known for his research in the last 15 years into melanoma and chemoprevention of cancer, Meyskens traces those interests to his father’s eye cancer. After diagnosing melanoma in his father, he began reading reports of laboratory experiments using vitamin A derivatives to treat the disease.
Dr. Philip DiSaia, who helped to recruit Meyskens to UCI, said Meyskens’ background suited him to the task of building another NCI cancer center. Moreover, he felt Meyskens’ focus on cancer prevention is a better approach to the disease.
This is “the new road,” DiSaia said.
“We have been struggling 34 years trying to kill cancers once they are established and have been only moderately successful. Seems to me it is a lot more logical to try to prevent them.”
