June 28 2021
PHILADELPHIA, PA — NRG Oncology, one of the five funded network groups within the National Cancer Institute (NCI)’s National Clinical Trials Network (NCTN), has announced that Quynh-Thu Le, MD, professor of radiation oncology at the Stanford University School of Medicine, will serve as one of its three Group Chairs effective July 1, 2021.She joins Drs. Robert Mannel Jr. and Norman Wolmark as the NRG Oncology Group Chairs and principal investigators of the group’s federal grant awards. She assumes the Presiding Chair role that Mitchell Machtay, MD, held on an interim basis since January of this year when Walter J Curran, MD, stepped down from his NRG Oncology leadership position to become the Global Chief Medical Officer of GenesisCare. Dr. Machtay, the Associate Director for Clinical Research, Penn State Cancer Institute, will continue in his role as NRG Oncology’s Deputy Group Chair for Research and President of the RTOG Foundation.
“I am greatly honored to be appointed as Group Chair for NRG Oncology and am excited to collaborate in its leadership. Fostering the development of biomarker-driven trials as well as research that addresses health disparities are two areas that I believe will help us define new standards of care for our cancer patients. I look forward to collaborating with Drs. Mannel and Wolmark, NRG Oncology’s committee leaders, our researchers and clinical associates from the group’s diverse membership and patient advocates to expand our current research program and develop new research initiatives,” stated Le.
“Robert Mannel and I are pleased to welcome Dr. Le in her new role as an NRG Oncology Group Chair and look forward to working with her on initiatives that will continue NRG Oncology’s legacy at the forefront of cancer research,” said Wolmark.
Le is chair of the Radiation Oncology Department at the Stanford University School of Medicine where she holds the Katharine Dexter McCormick & Stanley Memorial Professorship and co-directs the Radiation Biology Program at the Stanford Cancer Institute. Prior to being appointed as an NRG Oncology Group Chair, she served as a key clinical and translational investigator on multiple NRG and RTOG trials, and since 2012 as chair of the NRG Oncology Head and Neck Cancer Committee. Le was recently elected chair of the RTOG Foundation Board of Directors.
www.nrgoncology.org
NRG Oncology conducts practice-changing, multi-institutional clinical and translational research to improve the lives of patients with cancer. Founded in 2012, NRG Oncology is a Pennsylvania-based nonprofit corporation that integrates the research of the legacy National Surgical Adjuvant Breast and Bowel Project (NSABP), Radiation Therapy Oncology Group (RTOG), and Gynecologic Oncology Group (GOG) programs. The research network seeks to carry out clinical trials with emphases on gender-specific malignancies, including gynecologic, breast, and prostate cancers, and on localized or locally advanced cancers of all types. NRG Oncology’s extensive research organization comprises multidisciplinary investigators, including medical oncologists, radiation oncologists, surgeons, physicists, pathologists, and statisticians, and encompasses more than 1,300 research sites located world-wide with predominance in the United States and Canada. NRG Oncology is supported primarily through grants from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and is one of five research groups in the NCI’s National Clinical Trials Network.