Dr. Joseph Burchenal, 93; Chemotherapy Pioneer
Dr. Joseph H. Burchenal, one of the first clinicians to cure cancer with drugs, died of heart failure March 8 in an assisted-living center in Hanover, N.H. He was 93.
Burchenal “opened the eyes of the world to the value of chemotherapy for cancer,” said Dr. Harmon Eyre, chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society.
He “was then, as he was throughout his life, a quiet, gentle man who people in the field would recognize as one of the original American giants of medical oncology,” added Dr. John Durant, a former executive vice president of the American Society for Clinical Oncology.
When Burchenal began his work in the late 1940s at what is now the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, physicians could do little for cancer patients. Small tumors could be cut out or blasted with radiation, but more-disseminated cancers were a literal death sentence.
For cancers of the blood, such as leukemia and lymphoma, survival was at best a few weeks after diagnosis.
Burchenal began working with a drug called methotrexate, which blocks the production of folic acid, a compound that is crucial to the synthesis of DNA in proliferating cancer cells. He found that the drug could produce brief remissions in leukemia patients, giving them a few extra months of life.
Building on that finding, he chose as a model the treatment of tuberculosis, which could be cured only with a cocktail of several drugs. He explored the use of nitrogen mustards -- poison gases that had been turned into chemotherapy agents after researchers discovered that they suppressed the lymph system -- and vinca alkaloids, such as vincristine, which were obtained from plants in the periwinkle family.
“Each of those worked in a different way, and he could see that putting them together would help,” Eyre said. Within a few years, the five-year survival rate for some of the blood cancers had climbed from zero to 80%.
In the 1960s, he turned his attention to a rapidly growing tumor of the head and neck discovered in East African children by the British surgeon Dr. Denis P. Burkitt. Burchenal and Dr. Herbert F. Oettgen of Sloan-Kettering developed a regimen that included the anti-cancer drug cyclophosphamide and several others to combat the disease, which became known as Burkitt’s lymphoma.
The regimen led to remissions in two-thirds of the patients and cures in many.
In 1972, Burchenal and several other physicians received the Lasker Award for clinical medical research -- the highest U.S. award in medicine, often considered a precursor of the Nobel Prize -- for their work in developing cancer chemotherapy.
Throughout the rest of his career, he continued to study new cancer drugs, publishing more than 700 peer-reviewed papers. He also served as an advisor to U.S. Senate committees developing the highly publicized war on cancer.
In 1996, the American Assn. for Cancer Research established the Joseph H. Burchenal Clinical Research Award to honor those who have made significant contributions to the care of cancer patients.
Burchenal was born Dec. 21, 1912, in Milford, Del., and attended Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, Princeton University in New Jersey and the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. During World War II, he served as an infectious diseases specialist in Northern Ireland, England and France and as the chief of tropical diseases at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.
After the war, he went to Sloan-Kettering, where he spent his entire career until retiring in 1983. He was also a professor of medicine at Cornell University’s Weill Medical College.
“He was a very quiet, self-effacing man who was not seeking recognition,” Durant said. “He was just quietly promoting the proper use of these drugs.”
An avid skier and outdoorsman, Burchenal hiked on six continents, traveling well into his 80s. At 88, he climbed to the Gate of the Sun in the ancient Incan city of Machu Picchu in Peru.
In 1938, he married Margaret Pembroke Thom, who died in 1943.
In 1948, he married Joan Barclay Riley, who survives him. They lived in Darien, Conn., for 56 years before moving to New Hampshire two years ago.
Burchenal is also survived by three daughters, Holly Burchenal Nottebohm of Guatemala City, Jody Burchenal Nycum of Denver, and Bobbie Burchenal Landers of Darien; three sons, Caleb Wells Burchenal and Dr. Joseph E.B. Burchenal of Denver and Dr. David Holland Burchenal of Stonington, Conn.; a sister, Betty Maxfield of Wolfeboro, N.H.; 16 grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren.
