Oncology, Etc. – Global Cancer Policy Leader Dr. Richard Sullivan (Part 1)

Battling cancer takes place in many parts of the world and our next guest has led initiatives to do just that. In Part One of this Oncology, Etc. Podcast episode, Dr. Richard Sullivan, Professor of Cancer and Global Health at King’s College London, shares with us his intriguing life trajectory, encompassing a childhood in various parts of the world, aspirations for a veterinary career that turned to basic science, medicine, health policy (4:27), and even a long-term stint with the British Army Intelligence (12:22). Dr. Sullivan, who served as Director of Cancer Research UK for nearly a decade also discusses traits he looks for in a cancer investigator (19:21), and how to be happy (21:16)!

Guest Disclosures
Dr. Richard Sullivan: Honoraria – Pfizer; Consulting or Advisory Role – Pfizer
Dr. David Johnson: Consulting or Advisory Role – Merck, Pfizer, Aileron Therapeutics, Boston University
Dr. Patrick Loehrer: Research Funding – Novartis, Lilly Foundation, Taiho Pharmaceutical

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TRANSCRIPT 

Pat Loehrer: Hi, I'm Pat Loehrer. I'm director of the Center of Global Oncology and Health Equity at Indiana University Cancer Center.

 

Dave Johnson: And I'm Dave Johnson at UT Southwestern in Dallas, Texas.

 

Pat Loehrer: And this is Oncology, Etc. Dave, what book have you read this last month?

 

Dave Johnson: I have one I wanted to recommend to you. It's very interesting. It's by Steven Johnson, not of the syndrome fame. It's entitled Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer. You may have heard of this because PBS made a special documentary about this particular book. But in it, Johnson talks about the remarkable increase in human lifespan, especially over the 20th century, and the various factors that contributed to increased years of life from on average in the United States of about 48-49 in 1900 to just about 80 in the year 2000. So that beats anything in the history of mankind before.

 

And he has a chapter about each of the factors that contribute to this, and some of which I think we all recognize. Things like antibiotics playing a role, but some of the things that I hadn't thought about were improved drug regulation and the development of randomized controlled trials, which all of us have participated in. How important that is.

 

He also talked about, at least in the United States, the importance of automotive safety. And I'm sure some of us on this podcast are old enough to remember cars that did not have safety belts and certainly not other safety maneuvers that have really improved lifespan in that regard. So I found it a fascinating book. I think our listeners who are interested in medical history would also enjoy this text.

 

Pat Loehrer: Did he mention this podcast?

 

Dave Johnson: No, actually it wasn't mentioned, and I thought that was a tremendous oversight. So, I've sent him a letter and recommended that he add it.

 

Pat Loehrer: We may not live longer, but it just seems like we're living longer. When you listen to this podcast, time stands still.

 

Pat Loehrer: Well, it's my real great pleasure to introduce our interviewee today, Richard Sullivan. I met Richard several years ago through the late Professor Peter Boyle in Leon, and it's one of the greatest highlights of my life to be able to know Richard.

 

Professor Richard Sullivan's Research Group studies health systems and particularly chronic disease policy and the impact of conflict on health. He's a professor of cancer and Global Health at King's College in London and director of the Institute of Cancer Policy and Co-director of Conflict and Health Research Group. As well as holding a number of visiting chairs, Richard is an NCD advisor to the WHO, a civil military advisor to the Save the Children Foundation, and a member of the National Cancer Grid of India. His research focuses on global cancer policy and planning and health system strengthening, particularly in conflict ecosystems. He's principal investigative research programs ranging from automated radiotherapy planning for low resource settings to the use of augmented or virtual reality for cancer surgery through the political economy to build affordable equitable cancer control plans around the world.

 

Richard has led more Lancet Oncology commissions than anyone else. In fact, Lancet is talking about calling it the Sullivan Commissions. He's led five Lancet Oncology commissions and worked on four others. He's currently co-leading the Lancet Oncology Commission on the Future of Cancer Research in Europe and Cancer Care and Conflict in the conflict systems. His research teams have had major programs in capacity building in conflict regions across the Middle East and North Africa. He's done studies on the basic packages of health services in Afghanistan and worked in Pakistan, Syria, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. He's been a member of the British Army, intelligence and security, and in that capacity he's worked many years in biosecurity and counterterrorism issues. I think in some ways, this is the most interesting man in the world, and it's our pleasure today to have Richard join us. Richard, thank you for coming.

 

Richard Sullivan: Pat, Dave, you're really too kind. Marvelous to be with you. Thank you for the invitation.

 

Pat Loehrer: Can you tell us a little about your upbringing and early life before you became Dr. James Bond?

 

Richard Sullivan: I'm not sure that's anywhere close to the truth, sadly. But, yeah, I have had a very interesting, eclectic life. I was born in Aden just on the cusp of where the British Aden Protectorate met a country which actually no longer exists, the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen. Because after the British left Aden, essentially the East Germans, and what was then the Soviet Union took over southern Yemen. So I was born in a very unusual part of the world, which sadly, since then has just deteriorated. I spent many years of my life with my parents, who were in the diplomatic service and doing other things, wandering around the globe, mainly in the Middle East and East Africa. We spent quite a lot of time, strangely enough, we washed up on the shores in the USA once as well. Dayton, Ohio, and eventually-

 

Pat Loehrer:  Not to interrupt you, Richard, there are no shores in Dayton, Ohio. So just correct you there.

 

Richard Sullivan: That is so true. My memory - cornfields everywhere. I had a wonderful dog then, that's how I remember it so well. And I didn't really come back to the UK until, oh, gosh, I was nearly 10-11 years old. So, coming back to the UK was actually a bit of a culture shock for me. And then relatively classical in terms of the UK, sort of minor public school and then into medical school. In the old days when it was in the 80’s. I had a fabulous childhood, going all over the place, seeing lots of things, being exposed to lots of different cultures. I think it remained with me all my life. I never really feel a foreigner in a foreign land. That's nice. That's really unique and it's been marvelous being able to tie in the passion for global health with my upbringing as well. So, yeah, I had a wonderful childhood.

 

Dave Johnson: Would you mind expanding on your medical training, Richard? Tell us a little bit about that.

 

Richard Sullivan: Yeah, so when I, when I went to medical school in the UK, we were still running the old system. And by the old system, I mean, you know, these small medical schools with entries of, you know, 70, 80 individuals, particularly in London, you had that St. Mary's Hospital Medical School, which is where I went, Charing Cross, Guy’s, St. Thomas', and they were all individual medical schools. Now, most of these now have merged together into these super medical schools. But certainly when I went to medical school, I'll be absolutely honest with you, I wanted to be a vet to begin with, but actually discovered I wasn't bright enough to be a vet. It was harder to become a vet than it was to become a doctor. In my day going into medicine, and people listening to this, or some people who understand the A level system in the UK will recognize if you're offered a BCD, that's quite low grades to get into medical school. So I went to Mary’s, to be absolutely honest with you, because I heard that they took people that played rugby, and I came from a rugby-playing school. And sure enough, 90% of the interview was based on my rugby prowess, and that was St. Mary's Hospital Medical School. So it was wonderful.

 

And we'd already had people going there who were big rugby players. And again, it was, I remember thinking to myself, am I making the right decision here? But it was interesting, as soon as I went into medical school, I realized that was the life for me. I had done myself a favor by not going into veterinary science, which I would have been awful at. We had six years of very, very intensive pre-medicine, the classical medical rotations, and then that movement into the old schools of pre registration house officers, registrar jobs. We were quite an early stage. I kind of slightly went off-piste and started doing more academic work. Interestingly, most of my academic early days academic work was not in health policy and research. It was actually in very hard core cell signaling. So my doctorate was in biochemistry, and we worked on small GTPases, calcium-sensing proteins.

 

There were some really extraordinary heady days, and I'm talking here about the early nineties and the mid-nineties of tremendous discovery, real innovation. I was at UCL at the time, but mixing and matching that up with a sort of surgical training, and again, surgical training in those days was pretty classical. You went into your general surgery, then sort of specialized. It was really, really interesting but it was full on. I mean, you spent your entire life working. Morning to night so these were the days of 100 hours week rotations. You were doing one in twos, one in threes. That's every other night and every other weekend on call. It was incredibly intense, but there was a lot more diversity and plasticity in those days. You could dip in and out of medicine because of the way you were chosen and how you were recruited. So it suited my personality because I liked moving around and doing different things and that sort of took me through, really until the late 1990s.

 

Pat Loehrer: You became a urologist, right?

 

Richard Sullivan: That's right. Exactly. So I trained up until the late 1990s, it was all pretty standard, I would say. And then I decided I was bored and moved into the pharmaceutical industry and I went to work in for Merck Damstadt at the time, which was relatively small. I was going to say family owned, but it was quite family-owned pharmaceutical company that was just moving into oncology. And because I'd done the background in cell signaling and cell signaling was really the backbone of the new era of targeted therapies, this seemed like a great move. To be absolutely blunt with you, I didn't last very long, less than a couple of years, I think, mainly because I just found the whole environment way too constraining. But what it did provide me with was a springboard to meet the wonderful late Gordon McVie, who I met at a conference. And he said to me, ‘You're absolutely wasting your time and life by staying in the pharmaceutical industry. Why don't you come out, get an academic job at University College London and become my head of clinical programs?” - for what was then the Cancer Research Campaign. This Cancer Research Campaign and the Imperial Cancer Research Fund were the forerunners of Cancer Research UK. So, you know, this was an offer that was too good to be true.

 

So I jumped ship immediately, went back into academic life and joined CRC. And really the next ten years was this extraordinary blossoming of the merger of CRC with the Imperial College Research Fund, the creation of Cancer Research UK, and that was Paul Nurse, and obviously Gordon and me, bringing that all together. And it was the heady days of that resurgence of cancer, the importance of cancer care and research in the UK. And coupled with that, of course, it was the blossoming of my interest, really then into the global health aspects of cancer, which really, Gordon, people like you mentioned already, the late, wonderful Peter Boyle, all those individuals were already engaged in and they were the ones that really kind of catapulted me into a more international scene.

 

Dave Johnson: Did you know Dr. McVie before you met him at this conference, or was it just a chance encounter?

 

Richard Sullivan: No, he actually met me via John Mendelson, because John had picked up a paper I'd been writing on basically the very early versions of Rituximab that we were working on and we were looking for pharmacodynamic endpoints. And of course, one of the things I noticed with the patients is they were getting all these skin rashes on their faces, and I thought, that's terrific. Just seemed to be the skin rashes seemed to be together with those individuals that had better responses. And I remember writing this paper for Signal, which was a kind of relatively minor journal, and I think it was John Mendelson who picked it up and must have mentioned something to Gordon. Gordon hunted me out down at a particular conference, said, "How on earth do you know about this, that you're not anything more than a surgeon?" He was absolutely right about, goodness sake, what do you know about pharmacodynamic endpoints, and I kind of had to sort of confess that I've gone kind of slightly off-piste by doing biochemistry and cells signaling and working with these extraordinary people. And that's how I essentially met Gordon. He was very good for spotting slightly unusual, eclectic human beings.

 

Pat Loehrer: I'm very curious about the intersection of your work and how you got into the British Army and Intelligence with medicine and how that even may continue even today. So explain that story, that part of your life a little bit to us.

 

Richard Sullivan: Yeah, it was very early on, as I went into medical school, one of the key concerns was making money. I looked around for ways of doing something interesting to make money, and most of the jobs on offer were bar jobs, et cetera. Then I thought, what about the Territorial Army, which, in the early days of the 1980s, was, and still is, a very large component of the UK Armed Forces. So I actually joined the Royal Army Medical Corps, as you would expect for someone going into medicine. I thought, okay, I'll join the Royal Army Medical Corps, and I was a combat Medical Training Technician, et cetera. So I went along, signed up, and I think I was about three months into training when I was at a place called Kew Barracks and some chap came up to me and handed me a little bit of paper. It said "Intelligence Security Group" and gave a phone number. He said, "This is more your line of work. Why don't you give them a ring?"

 

It was interesting because, in those early days, they were looking for analysts who could work on lots of different areas. In those days, most of the work was domestic.. Of course, there was counterterrorism with Northern Ireland, but there was also the Soviet Union, and the fallout from the Warsaw Pact, so they were still actively recruiting into that area. There are lots of details I can’t talk about, but it was relatively, to begin with, quite hard work and low level. It was a lot of learning foreign equipment recognition. It was what we consider to be standard combat intelligence. But the more time you spend in it, the more interesting it gets.

 

One of the areas they were looking to recruit into, which I didn't realize at the time but only later, was bioweapons and biosecurity. They needed people who understood biotechnology and the language of science, and who could be taught the language of infectious disease on top of that. That is quite a difficult combination to find. It’s very easy to teach people trade craft and intelligence, it’s very hard to teach them subject matter expertise. And they were really missing people who specialized in that area.

 

It was interesting because it was still a relatively open domain. There was still a lot of work going on in the counterterrorism front with biological weapons, and a lot around the Verification of the Biological Weapons and Toxin Convention. And it was an interesting, and I'd almost say parallel life. But your medical knowledge and the scientific knowledge I had already gained and was gaining was what was being looked for. So that was very early on and it has expanded over the years. More and more now we talk about health security and intelligence so that goes beyond what you would consider classic medical intelligence or Armed Forces - this is more about putting together the disciplines of intelligence with the securitized issues of, for example Ebola. That is a classic example. The big outbreaks in West Africa, the DRC, these are sort of the classic security intelligence issues - even COVID 19 for example - and mostly around the world, what we've seen is the intelligence apparatus taking front and center in that, whether you're looking at states like South Korea, et cetera. So I've moved more into that, and we do a lot of work and research into this as well. So we look at, particularly now, how to improve human intelligence in this area, the pros and cons of signal intelligence collection. And we go as far as to kind of ask sort of deep ethical and moral issues, for example, about how far should these sorts of apparatus of state be applied to public good issues like health. Because at the end of the day, when you're talking about the armed forces security sector, their primary job is for defense of the realm. So applying them in other areas obviously comes with a whole load of moral and ethical challenges. So, yes, it's been a fascinating journey, which, as I said, it extends all the way back to the late 1980s. It's been both complementary and different.

 

Dave Johnson: So, Richard, there's so many things in your resume that warrant exploration, but you served as Clinical Director of Cancer Research UK for nearly a decade. What was that experience like, and what accomplishment are you most proud of?

 

Richard Sullivan: It was an enormous privilege. In your life, you always look at some jobs and you think, “How lucky I was to be there at that time with those people.” I think, first of all, enormous respect for the people that ran both Cancer Research Campaign, Imperial Cancer Research Fund – I mean, Paul Nurse and Gordon McVeigh, Richard Treisman – I mean, some extraordinary people who were leading both of these charities. And so to be there at that moment when they both came together, but more importantly as well, they had this most amazing global network of literally the illuminati of cancer research, spanning from basic science all the way through to epidemiology, public health, health systems. And in those days, of course, those individuals would come on site visits to the UK to look at the different units and evaluate them. So you can imagine when you're bringing those sorts of individuals across, you get a chance to go out with them, go drinking, talk to them, learn about their research, and also learn about the extraordinary breadth of research that was there in the UK. So you're condensing almost a lifetime's worth of learning into a few years. It was an absolute privilege to have been able to serve the community like that.

 

What I'm most proud of? Gosh, I like to think I suspect that most proud of trying to help a lot of the fellows get through to where they were going to actually get the most out of their careers. When I look back, there are lots and lots of names of people who started at a very early stage with funding from Cancer Research Campaign or the Imperial College Research Fund, who are now very, very senior professors and global research leaders. And I like to think that we did a little bit to help them along that way and also help to support individual research programs actually reach their full potential. Because I think research management and planning is often overlooked. People think of this as very transactional – it's not transactional. It's an incredibly important, serious discipline. It requires very careful handling to get the very best out of your research ecosystem. You've really, really got to get under the skin and really have a clear view of how you're going to help people. So I think that's what I'm most proud of – is the individuals who made it all the way through and now these great leaders out there.

 

But it was also, let's be honest, it was halcyon days. Great innovations, great discoveries, new networks growing, incredible expansion of funding in the UK, in Europe, in the USA. They were very, very good days. And it was, as I said, it was a real privilege to be there almost at the center for nearly a decade.

 

Dave Johnson: Let me follow up on that, if I may, just for a moment. You have had such an incredible influence. What characteristics do you think are most desired in a cancer investigator? What sorts of things do you look for, especially when you're thinking about funding someone?

 

Richard Sullivan: Creativity. I think creativity is really important. We talk about the word innovation a lot, and it's an interesting engineering term, but creativity is that spark that you can see it in people, the way they talk about what they're doing. They have this really creative approach. And with that, I think you have to have the passion. Research careers are long and difficult, and I'd probably suggest there's probably more downs than there are ups, and you have to have that passion for it. And I think along with that passion is the belief in what you're doing – that first of all, you have that belief that actually drives you forward, that what you know you're doing is good work, and that you're really dedicated to it. But obviously, hand on heart, when you're looking at researchers, it's that passion and that creativity.

 

I think it's a brave person to judge how any person's career or program is going to go. I don't think any of us are prophets. Even in our own land. We might be able to see slightly into the future, but there are so many elements that make up  “success”. It's funny when I look back and I think those who've been successful, it's people who've also been generally happy in their lives. They've found their careers in whatever shape or form, fulfilling, and they've generally been happy human beings, and they've managed to create a life around research which has given them meaning.

 

Pat Loehrer: Richard, you have reinvented yourself a number of times – this transition of going from like a basic scientist, a surgeon, moving into public policy and global policy. Tell me a little bit about the journey that's been in terms of academics. How do you learn? What were the transition points in each of these things to get you now to be, as I mentioned before, kind of the key person for Lancet’s commissions to somebody who was a rugby player?

 

Richard Sullivan: I suppose if you're being mean, you say, he clearly gets bored easily. But it's not that. Actually, I'm not very instrumental about life either. I mean, there are many people you will meet who have got their lives and strategies mapped out. They know they're going to do X next year, Y the following year. And for me, it's never been like that. For me, it's that excitement, that creativity of working on new and interesting things, but also knowing when you've run out of road in a particular area, where it no longer gets you out of bed in the morning, where you no longer feel happy, where you no longer feel you’re contributing. All of us talking today have the great privilege of having choice about our lives, about what direction our lives should take. And it's not a privilege one should squander lightly because many people do not have choices about their lives. It's all about chance. And having that choice to be able to move into different areas is really important because I said you can stick in the same thing because you think you have to. And you can become an unhappy, miserable human being. And that makes you a miserable researcher to be around. It makes you a terrible doctor. Probably makes you a terrible person, actually, generally, if you're having a miserable life.

 

So finding new things, that really you're passionate about how you do it, there's no shortcut in this. It's hard work. Readily admit I went back to law school of economics, retaught myself lots of things. There are no shortcuts for. Deciding if you're going to a new area is learning, learning, practice, practice, practice, and just doing the hard work. I think that's an ethos that was probably drilled into us quite early anyway in medical school, because that's how you approach medicine. That's how you approach science when I was growing up. And it was that idea of humility that you can never have enough learning, you will always learn off other people. That's probably what drove me and how I've managed to change and as I say, who knows what the future is? I don't know. Maybe one day I'll think about doing a bit of poetry.

 

Dave Johnson: Your comments about happiness and work resonate with Pat and me. I think we both feel like humor is really important for happiness and career success. And, you know, Osler once said, “The master word of medicine is work.” You can't get around that. It is what it is. And I think you just reaffirmed that.

 

Well, this concludes part one of our interview with Richard Sullivan, professor of Cancer and Global Health at King's College, London and director of the King's Institute of Cancer Policy and co-director of the Conflict and Health Research Group. In the second part of this episode, Professor Sullivan will speak about the progress of global health, especially in conflict areas, and the need for young people to enter into the world of oncology and oncology research.

 

Thank you to all of our listeners for tuning into Oncology, Etc. This is an ASCO educational podcast where we will talk about just about anything and everything. So if you have an idea for a topic or a guest you would like us to interview, please email us at [email protected]. Thank you again for listening. 

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