News & Events: Laura Esserman Honor and Awards

Susan G. Komen®, the world's leading breast cancer organization, recognized two widely respected and innovative breast cancer researchers this week, announcing that Donald McDonnell, Ph.D., and Laura Esserman, M.D., have been selected as this year's recipients of the Brinker Awards – Komen's highest scientific honor. This year's Brinker Award for Scientific Distinction in Clinical Research will be presented to Laura Esserman, M.D., M.B.A., Director, Carol Franc Buck Breast Care Center, Alfred A. de Lorimier Endowed Chair in General Surgery, Professor of Surgery and Radiology, University of [...]

Laura J. Esserman, MD, MBA and her research team have been awarded a $9.1M NIH R01 grant from the National Cancer Institue (NCI). The focus of the grant is to enable expansion of The WISDOM Study to new recruitment sites/partnerships including Louisiana State University, the University of Chicago, the University of Alabama, and a women's health clinical care network in Florida. This will advance the goal of increasing diversity in the study, provide the benefits of the study to underserved populations, and enable generalizability of study results to the demographics of the US. Project [...]

"Getting the news that you have cancer is overwhelming and frightening. The COVID-19 crisis adds another layer of anxiety. But know this: you can protect yourself from COVID-19 without compromising your cancer treatment. Don't panic. In the vast majority of cases, a diagnosis of cancer is not an emergency even though it feels like one. There is time to learn about your options and sort out what is right for you. For now, there will be changes to how we do things. Some of the changes will feel disruptive, but many will lead to better, more patient-centered care. Minimizing your chances of [...]

"Quantum Leap Healthcare Collaborative (QLHC), a non-profit organization focused on uniting patient care and research, and sponsor of the adaptive platform I-SPY 2 Trial™, announced today a unique pre-competitive consortium created for an I-SPY COVID Trial to rapidly identify therapies to treat acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) in critically ill COVID-19 patients. Approximately 10-15% of patients infected with SARS-CoV2 develop a severe acute respiratory illness, and nearly 70% of patients admitted to an ICU require ventilation for an average of two weeks; it is estimated over half [...]

Laura J. Esserman, MD, MBA has been awarded a $760K FDA Grant through the UCSF-Stanford Center of Excellence in Regulatory Science and Innovation (CERSI). CERSI is a joint undertaking among the UCSF School of Pharmacy and School of Medicine, the Stanford University School of Engineering and School of Medicine and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the first regulatory science and innovation center on the West Coast. The grant funds Phase 2 of the "OneSource" Project, which is designed to address regulatory challenges of information systems relating to clinical research given the [...]

Dr. Laura Esserman is on a mission to bring the blockchain to health care. I can already hear the audible groans and see the general eye-rolling—I get it. There have been plenty of bold claims when it comes to blockchain, the decentralized ledger technology, in pretty much every sector from food to medicine. So far, the sizzle to steak ratio has been out of whack, and skepticism is integral to good science. But Esserman, a renowned surgeon and director of the UCSF Carol Franc Buck Breast Care Center, believes blockchain can slash the cost of cancer drug development while spurring new [...]

Behind any landmark cure is years of medical research. But the old goal of research — to find a one-size-fits-all treatment for a disease, based on a set of standard protocols — must radically change to further and diversify advances in the field, experts argued at the TIME 100 Health Summit on Thursday. "We're all in it, at the end of the day, for our patients," said Dr. Laura Esserman, professor of surgery at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine. "We want to get people to a better outcome." In the field of breast cancer, for example, the same cancer screening and [...]

Laura J. Esserman, MD, MBA was selected as the 2018 OncLive® "Giant of Cancer Care" in Cancer Diagnostics. Dr. Esserman is professor of Surgery and Radiology at UCSF and director of the UCSF Carol Franc Buck Breast Care Center. She was chosen by an elite committee of her peers based on her long history of outstanding work in the field as noted in the announcement: Dr. Esserman led efforts to address harms of screening including overdiagnosis, and proposed tools including the development of molecular diagnostics to help reclassify tumors as indolent lesions of epithelial origin or [...]

UCSF News reports on Time magazine's selection of Laura Esserman, MD, MBA,  to the 2016 TIME 100, the magazine's annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world. Dr. Esserman is Professor of Surgery and Radiology, and Director of the Carol Franc Buck Breast Care Center at UCSF. Time magazine has named internationally renowned breast cancer oncologist Laura Esserman, MD, MBA, to the 2016 TIME 100, the magazine's annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world. Esserman has been at the forefront of efforts to change the delivery of breast cancer services as well as [...]