Ronald A. DePinho (born 1955) is an American physician and research scientist. He served as president of MD Anderson Cancer Center from 2011 to 2017.[1] DePinho states that his concern for reducing the burden of cancer suffering became his life goal in 1998, when his father died of colon cancer.[2]
DePinho spent 14 years at Dana–Farber Cancer Institute. He served as founding director of the Belfer Institute for Applied Cancer Science and was an American Cancer Society Research Professor in the Department of Medicine (Genetics) at Harvard Medical School. Previously, he held several faculty positions during 10 years at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, where he was the Betty and Sheldon Feinberg Senior Scholar in Cancer Research.[citation needed]
DePinho is Professor and former president in the Department of Cancer Biology at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, and holds the Harry Graves Burkhart III Distinguished University Chair in Cancer Biology.[4] He assumed the presidency at MD Anderson on September 1, 2011. There, he founded the Institute for Applied Cancer Science to accelerate development of next-generation targeted immune- and cell-based cancer therapies. He launched MD Anderson's Cancer Moon Shots Program, which became a model for the White House Cancer Moonshot funded by President Barack Obama under the leadership of then-Vice President Joe Biden[5][6] and administered by National Cancer Institute.[7]
DePinho publicly announced his resignation as MD Anderson president on March 8, 2017, after scrutiny over the administration of the organization had put him in the spotlight. "DePinho's five-and-a-half years at the helm of the world's largest cancer center were marked by unprecedented turbulence, questions of conflicts of interest, and unhappiness on the part of the faculty."[8]
Research
DePinho is best known for his work on telomerase and telomere disfunction as it relates to cancer and aging. Specifically, in collaboration with Carol Greider, he generated the first telomeraseknockout mouse.[9] This work led to a deeper understanding of telomerase and telomere dysfunction in cancer, aging and a range of degenerative diseases, including fibrosis.
DePinho's scientific program has made basic discoveries underlying cancer in the aged and factors governing acquired and inherited degenerative disorders. His laboratory established the concept of tumor maintenance, discovered a core pathway of aging and demonstrated that aging is a reversible process.[10] He has constructed and used refined mouse models of cancer to identify many new cancer targets and diagnostics.[citation needed]
