Harold M. Maurer, M.D., chancellor of the University of Nebraska Medical
Center, has been named a recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award of
the Childrens Oncology Group, a National Cancer Institute-supported clinical
cooperative cancer treatment and research group.
Im tremendously honored and humbled, Dr. Maurer said. To get a Lifetime
Achievement Award from all of your peers in the United States, it actually
makes me tremble a little bit. Its the greatest kind of recognition that
a physician could receive.
Dr. Maurer will be one of four physicians presented with the award on
Friday, March 28, at the Childrens Oncology Group meeting in Atlanta.
The other cancer-treatment pioneers include Denman Hammond, M.D., professor
of pediatrics and associate vice president of health affairs at the University
of Southern California in Arcadia, Calif.; Teresa Vietti, M.D., professor
emeritus of pediatrics at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo.; and
Giulio DAngio, M.D., professor emeritus of Radiation Oncology and Pediatric
Oncology at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.
Dr. Maurer is being recognized for his significant contributions to
pediatric cancer research, specifically his work with the Intergroup Rhabdomyosarcoma
Study Group, which he helped to form in 1972. He chaired the group for
the next 25 years, becoming the worlds foremost expert on the disease.
The IRSG is credited with raising the cure rate of children afflicted with
the disease from 20 percent to 75 percent.
When I began my career, there was no literature about how to effectively
treat rhabdomyosarcoma, Dr. Maurer said. All of the treatments were very
radical, and we basically said, Time out. Theres got to me a more effective
way of treating children with this disease. As is turned out, there was.
Rhabdomyosarcoma is a malignant tumor found in soft tissue of children.
The most common sites are the structures of the head and neck, the urogenital
tract, and the arms or legs, but the cancer can form almost anywhere. Each
body site, when afflicted with the cancer, has its own special problems,
Dr. Maurer said. The cause of rhabdomyosarcoma is unknown. The vast majority
of children with the disease do not have any known risk factors. With several
hundred new cases per year throughout the United States, the cancer is
the fifth-most common cancer found in children under age 15.
Dr. Maurer was a young physician-scientist at the Medical College of
Virginia in Richmond when he diagnosed a young girl with rhabdomyosarcoma
in her leg and in her lung. The standard treatment at that time was to
amputate her leg and to surgically remove a portion of her lung. Instead,
Dr. Maurer irradiated the tumor in the lung, resected the tumor from the
girls leg, irradiated the post-operative tumor bed and proceeded with
a novel chemotherapy regimen.
She did real well, Dr. Maurer said.
Still, the lack of any literature on rhabdomyosarcoma and the radical
treatment that disfigured many children bothered Dr. Maurer. He wanted
to form a study group, but needed more cases than were available regionally.
Eventually, his idea of a study group made it to Dr. Hammond, a professor
at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a key clinical researcher
for the National Cancer Institute (NCI).
At a meeting in Park City, Utah, Dr. Maurer and several other physician-scientists
met with Dr. Hammond to discuss study groups in rhabdomyosarcoma and three
other childhood cancers. The rhabdomyosarcoma group was the only one to
survive more than five years.
In 1972, with funding from the NCI, the Intergroup Rhabdomyosarcoma
Study Committee (it would be formally become an NCI-recognized group in
the early 1990s) launched its first integrative study, the first of four,
six-year studies that the group would conduct over the next 25 years. The
historical results were not good: only 20 percent of children who were
afflicted with the disease in the United States survived.
Over the next two decades, however, that number increased to 75 percent,
as hospitals around the country and world began to treat patients based
on the research from the rhabdomyosarcoma study group.
It became the gold standard of treatment, Dr. Maurer said.
Dr. Maurer credits the work of the group for bettering the treatment
of rhabdomyosarcoma patients. He said that team members wrote dozens upon
dozens of papers and presented hundreds of lectures and seminars, never
worrying about who was getting the credit.
Dr. Maurer himself is author of more than 200 publications and is the
editor of a pediatrics textbook and a book on rhabdomyosarcoma. He also
has presented at more than 150 scientific meetings and has served on the
editorial boards of the American Journal of Hematology, the Journal of
Pediatric Hematology and Oncology, and the Medical and Pediatric Oncology
Journal.
In 1993, when he came to UNMC as the College of Medicine dean, Dr. Maurer
brought nearly $1 million a year in National Institutes of Health grant
money, relating to his research into rhabdomyosarcoma. He stepped down
as chairman of the study group in 1998. The study group eventually became
part of the Childrens Oncology Group when all childrens cancer study
groups in the United States were combined.
This award isnt about what Ive done, but what the people on my team
have done all over the world, Dr. Maurer said. They didnt care who got
the credit, they just wanted children with this terrible disease to be
treated better and to have better lives. I am glad that in most cases,
we were able to achieve that.