UNMC’s Scientist Laureate: Hamid Band, MD, PhD

This profile is part of a series to highlight the researchers who will be honored at a ceremony today (Nov. 14) for UNMC’s Scientist Laureate, Research Leadership, Distinguished Scientist and New Investigator Award recipients.

Looking back now on his career as a scientist, Hamid Band, MD, PhD, can see scientific endeavor as a marathon.

As a senior researcher with a 17-year tenure at UNMC, Dr. Band has logged many miles in his career. But just as important as an end goal in the long arc of science, Dr. Band says, are all the smaller steps to carry the marathon-running researchers along the way.

Defining the goals well. Teaming up with good coaches. Training hard. Showing persistence and resilience. And finding achievement in each milepost completed.

Now Dr. Band – the Elizabeth Bruce Professor of Cancer Research with the UNMC Eppley Institute for Research in Cancer and Allied Diseases and director of the Center for Breast Cancer Research – is receiving a significant achievement for staying his course.

Today, he will be honored as UNMC’s 19^th Scientist Laureate – the highest honor that the institution bestows upon its researchers.

As he takes the occasion to look back, Dr. Band said he feels happy to have led a purpose-driven career and hopes he motivated some of his trainees to do the same.

“Science is constantly evolving,” Dr. Band said, “and what we research today will be old knowledge or obsolete technology in a few years. I believe that a long career requires us to be life-long learners. It has been a source of success for me – I highly recommend it.”

The research that Dr. Band is most closely associated with throughout much his career continues to move forward.

It involves molecular pathways and their signaling that, when that signaling goes wrong, has been linked to cancer. His team’s initial discovery of the pathway was “quite serendipitous,” Dr. Band said, but it has spawned a long-term research effort.

Today, he said, that work, together with the work of others that joined the field, has been instrumental in multiple therapeutics companies developing drug candidates that have reached the clinical trials stage as anti-cancer agents. In related areas, the goal behind the research continues to be to look for undiscovered or untapped switches in cellular operations that, perhaps someday, next-generation therapeutics could target to turn off a cancer.

It was that drive to answer the unknowns in science that drew Dr. Band to research in the first place.

With the intent to become a physician, he graduated from medical school at Medical College Srinagar in Kashmir, India, and went on to serve as a medical intern and resident, taking care of patients for the first few years of his career. But the patients whose illnesses left him baffled led him to ask deeper questions about health care and the human body: How does it all work? Why do some things work, and others don’t?

At a fork in his career, Dr. Band said, he took the road less traveled away from patient care.

“I have always missed taking care of patients,” he said. “But I have been well-rewarded with the joy and excitement of scientific discovery and solving biological puzzles.”

His turn of focus also allowed him to experience a second love in his career: Being a research mentor.

Through the course of his career, Dr. Band figures he has interacted with well over 100 trainees in research, from a few high school students, to undergraduates, grad students and postdocs, along with junior faculty.

His goal is to find out where each trainee wants to go, then help them along that path. Today, he has former students who have advanced in academia and private pharmaceutical companies, where they’re helping make the latest drugs.

Dr. Band said: “To know that they still think that I was a part of their journey at a critical juncture, that I helped them find their calling and helped them find where they wanted to go – and they have been successful in that – it’s actually quite exciting.”

In his own career, Dr. Band still sees himself continuing for at least a few more years, maybe less if his health intervenes after he recently underwent surgery, radiation and a yearlong adjuvant treatment for a rare cancer, a salivary duct carcinoma. He thanks the medical advances brought on by others and his oncology care team at the Fred & Pamela Buffett Cancer Center for being able to continue with his scientific journey.

He appreciates that his research will not reach an end but will carry on in different forms because he has helped develop a new level of scientific understanding in the field.

“That knowledge – it makes me get up every day, and it makes me to go to work,” Dr. Band said, “because I have a strong belief that, eventually, it will help if I create even a small amount of knowledge. For me, that’s been personally helpful to always stay optimistic.”

Dr. Band also still enjoys guiding students.

“I still enjoy the ability to sit down with students and go through experiments and say, ‘Haha, that means something different than what we thought. And let’s figure out how it works.’”

“That thrill is too powerful to give up easily.”