Dr. Nagourney
Despite a half century that has spawned more innovation than the world has ever seen, success rates for the treatment of cancer have not improved in four decades. This unexplainable phenomenon has driven Dr. Robert A. Nagourney to dedicate an entire career in search of better, more rational ways to treat cancer.
Nagourney is the medical director of the Todd Cancer Institute at Long Beach Memorial Medical Center, where he specializes in laboratory directed cancer therapy. His goal is to address the frustrations of patients who are burdened by the current practice of receiving treatment after treatment on the off chance that they might be one of the “30 percent” fortunate responders.
“Individual patients don’t respond to treatment 30 percent of the time, populations do,” Nagourney said. “Every patient’s cancer is unique. It is essential, therefore, that treatments be tailored to each individual patient.”
Nagourney has spent 20 years studying human cancer biology to make sense out of cancer’s fickle and largely unpredictable response in patients. He is a pioneer in the field of assay directed therapy, a rational approach to cancer treatment that is guided by an individual’s specific tumor response to various chemotherapeutics in the laboratory.
In 1986, Nagourney founded his first company that would commercialize chemo resistance assays to assist physicians in offering assay directed cancer therapy. These tests were successful at determining chemotherapeutic drugs that were resistant to an individual’s tumor – drugs that won’t work -- however he still wasn’t satisfied with the survival outcomes. Consequently, in 1993, Nagourney went on to found Rational Therapeutics, which dedicated itself to developing chemosensitivity assays that could accurately determine the drugs that would work, not just the drugs that won’t work, for each patient.
Rational Therapeutics now offers the EVA-PCD™ assay, which incorporates the most advanced and accurate methodology for ascertaining tumor cell sensitivity to various chemotherapy drugs.
- The EVA-PCD assay considers the ability of a chemotherapeutic to induce tumor cell death, a logical step forward from older assays that only measure tumor cell growth.
- The EVA-PCD assay analyzes tumor cell response to drugs in a microspheroid, which mimics cancer’s native environment within the body, and is a significant advancement over the single cell suspension methods of older assays that don’t allow cancer cells to interact and grow in a viable tumor cell environment.
“Cancer doesn’t grow too much. It dies too little,” Nagourney said. “With more than 70 FDA-approved cancer drugs, we have the tools to make cancer die. What so many don’t realize is that we also have the ability to determine the best drug for each patient.”
A native of Bridgeport, Conn., Nagourney completed his undergraduate education at Boston University, Mass., earning a bachelor of arts in chemistry. Nagourney went on to receive his medical degree from McGill University in Canada as a University Scholar. He then completed his residency in internal medicine at the University of California, Irvine, and the Long Beach Veterans Affairs Medical Center. Dr. Nagourney completed his Fellowship in Medical Oncology at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, D.C. As a recipient of the Scripps Institute Young Investigator Award, he completed further study in hematology at Scripps Clinic and Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif.
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