Marcel van den Brink, MD, PhD, started his career in "the real Holland with the windmills, tulip fields and all that good stuff." But he left all of it behind in the late 1980s to complete his oncology training in the United States.
Dr. Van den Brink worked at the Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, Durham, N.C.-based Duke University and Boston-based Harvard Medical School before landing at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, where he spent most of his career. By trade a bone marrow transplant specialist, medical oncologist and wet lab physician scientist, he became interested in leadership because "I feel that oncology is a rapidly developing field with upcoming novel therapies and clinical practices. This is a unique time to have leaders with a background in lab leadership roles."
In October, he was appointed president of City of Hope Los Angeles, City of Hope National Medical Center and the Deana and Steve Campbell Chief Physician Executive Distinguished Chair in Honor of Alexandra Levine, M.D.
"The culture of compassion has always been the secret sauce of City of Hope, and I'm incredibly proud of being part of that," Dr. van den Brink told Becker's. "I am proud that City of Hope continues to be the leader in providing critical outpatient care to our patients throughout our five-county area in Southern California.”
Here, he discusses his priorities, concerns in the field and leadership advice.
Note: Responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Question: What drew you to oncology?
Dr. Marcel van den Brink: My patient zero was literally the first night that I was on call as a medical student. I had my new white coat for the first time and was constantly looking at myself like "look, I'm wearing a white coat. I'm a real doctor now." And the first night there was this young man of my age, dying from melanoma. I was sitting next to his bed and saw him dying and he was my patient zero. I realized then that cancer is a devastating disease. In those days, there wasn't a treatment for melanoma and I wanted to work in this area where outcomes are so desperate, and the disease hits people at all ages.
The second motive was an amazing mentor in Holland who had the foresight in the late '80s to believe that immunotherapy for cancer was a thing and would actually advance and one day help give us good outcomes.
Q: What cancer study, technology or innovation are you most excited about right now?
MvdB: An area that I think will come to fruition and lead to therapies in the near future is microbiome research. I got into that relatively early. It's the simple concept that the microbes that live inside and outside us are there for a reason and they can be helpful and beneficial in many cases. The field is developing rapidly to understand that gut microbes can have an impact on health and disease in general and can even impact the outcomes of therapies both in terms of efficacy and toxicity. That's an area that City of Hope is working on. For instance, we're looking at how diet can change the composition of the gut microbiome in 48 hours. It opens a whole new way to think about diet as a therapy.
Q: What aspect of your work or the field keeps you up at night?
MvdB: What worries me most are disparities in every aspect. We see it in our daily practice, and it's so difficult to make real progress in this area.
That's one reason why I'm so proud to be part of City of Hope. They have been doing a number of exciting things with the goal of eliminating disparities. The system has been expanding its reach with new clinics and centers in other states, so now our practices can reach about 86 million people. We are focusing more on access to clinical trials to all patients over the network, and we're also doing more outreach programs to help people who don't have access to cancer care. For example, City of Hope is launching the most comprehensive mobile cancer prevention and screening unit in the country.
Q: What's one thing your system is doing in cancer care that you're most proud of?
MvdB: City of Hope was one of the first centers to specialize in bone marrow transplantation, and we are still one of the best every year in terms of outcomes. Consistently having the best outcomes is really part of our fiber and our fantastic bone marrow transplant program. Out of that also came our interest in chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) therapy, and I want to emphasize that we're also advancing cell therapy for solid tumors. For example, in addition to blood cancers, there are 13 different solid tumor types included in the 70 immune effector cell therapy clinical trials that are currently active at City of hope.
Q: What is the best leadership advice you've ever received?
MvdB: Shut up and listen. What I mean by that is to really listen. I'm now three months into this position and I used that time to just listen and learn. I think that was important and I learned this tip from previous mentors. Everybody in a leadership role has had a moment when you walk into a meeting and start talking immediately because you think you know what the subject matter is and that you think you have the answer. And then once you finally start to listen to others in the meeting, you realize that the problem is different or that somebody else had a much better answer than you came up with. So in meetings, I try to say as little as possible in the first five minutes, and I start it with open-ended questions and just listen.