This interview is fascinating, informative, and like the others, extraordinarily hopeful, but comes from a completely different perspective. This is an interview with Dr. Lawrence Rice, Chief of Hematology at Houston Methodist Hospital, and most importantly to me, my mother's physician. My dad and I met with Dr. Rice at his office in Smith Tower about a week ago and he sat with us for almost an hour to talk to us for this interview. This guy has a lot of more important things to do, I know that for sure, but he was nice enough to give us such great information to share with you today. For my dad and I though, the whole experience was special because at almost exactly 18 months from the last time we saw him, we got to sit down with him face to face and say, "Thank you". We got to thank him for never giving up on my mom and trying till the end to cure her. Although we could never thank him enough, it felt so good to let him know how grateful we were for his care and expertise.
Katie: So tell me about yourself? Where are you from? Where did you study? How did you get to Houston?
Dr. Rice: I was born in New York but grew up in Miami...I went to college at the University of Florida, and medical school at Emory in Atlanta. I have been in Houston forever, I came here as an intern in 1974. And I tell people I haven't left because I can't find anyone to pay me so much to do so little.
OK, you can mark that down as the understatement of the year. I am pretty sure he never stops working!
Dr. Rice came to Houston in 1974 for his Internal Medicine internship, residency, and Hematology fellowship at Baylor College of Medicine. He was then appointed to the faculty and became a Professor of Medicine and Professor of Thrombosis Research. For more than 20 years, he served as the Hematology Program Director and Director of the required medical student Hematology/Oncology course. A fun note, my sister Lindy took this course when she was in medical school at Baylor College of Medicine. He says, "she was forced to endure it"! Ha! I'd say she was lucky to learn from the best. In 2007 he became Chief of Hematology at Methodist and Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College.
Katie: What drew you to Hematology?
Dr. Rice: It's a fascinating field. It's a very broad field. I think it's the broadest field in medicine because you have to know so many things. Not only how to treat cancer but you have to know all about infections. You have to know all about blood clotting and bleeding. You have to know as much about liver diseases as liver specialists do. So, it's intellectually stimulating and exciting...many breakthroughs have occurred in the field of Hematology and then were translated to other fields. So it's very exciting to me...I am a pure hematologist. I treat both what we call benign hematology, which is often life-threatening and not so benign, but not technically cancer. Your mom had "benign" hematology problems at first. But I also treat blood cancers like Leukemia, Lymphoma, and Myeloma.
For those of you who don't know the background on mom, she first developed Idiopathic Thrombocytopenia Purpura (ITP) in October of 2011 which is an autoimmune disease where your body attacks its own platelets. This is when she became a patient of Dr. Rice. Her body also went on to attack her red blood cells, the Evan's Syndrome (a combination of ITP and autoimmune hemolytic anemia). As if she didn't have enough relatively rare blood problems, she also experienced for a time Pure Red Cell Aplasia. These autoimmune diseases are life-threatening, however many people, as my mom did, can be treated and move into remission. But as these are all blood-related diseases, a patient with her history has a greater chance to develop blood cancer down the road, and that is what happened with mom, and she was diagnosed with Large B-Cell Lymphoma in December of 2013. So clearly, with her history, we felt so fortunate to have an expert in Hematology work with my mom's very complex and ever-changing medical make-up.
Dr. Rice has contributed to many studies, research papers, and text books, treated countless number of patients, but I love where his passion lies. He loves to teach. And we could brag on all of his accomplishments and accolades, but his students are by far his crowning achievement.
Dr. Rice: "Of course there are patients and families who appreciate what I was able to do for them (um hello, that's us!), and while I have written and published well over a hundred articles and dozens of textbook chapters, my real legacy is the Hematologists all over the country, all over the world, whom I've trained and who still email me every day for advice on challenging patients. My greatest accomplishment in my career is an educator, a clinical educator...Having said that though, when my phone goes off the patient always comes first. But that's another thing I teach my students".
And it's true. I told him this too. I always felt like he was working on my mother's case 100% of the time. Like she was his only patient. I knew it couldn't be true, but his dedication to her case seemed to be his principal priority. And honestly, that's how we felt with all of the doctors, nurses, medical and non-medical staff at Methodist Hospital. It's an extraordinary place. One that is equipped to treat the whole body. The care mom received there was second to none, but what impressed me the most was the compassion for the patient and the patient's family that was a part of everyone who worked there. Nothing was more important than what was going on in your hospital room. I think I took for granted before mom was sick how lucky we were to have such a first class institution literally in our back yard, but after our time at Methodist, I will never stop singing its praises.
Ok, this is getting long! Enough about us, lets get to the reason we're here...
Katie: From your perspective as a clinical researcher, how important is funding from a non-profit like the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society?
Dr. Rice: It is essential. It is essential. We've made so much progress. The outlook for these disorders is improving every day and we would never be where we are today without it. We are moving forward so rapidly and it takes money to do it.
My Dad: You mentioned forward-looking things. What's on the horizon for Leukemia & Lymphoma?
Dr. Rice: Most of the recent advances have to do with genetic and molecular mechanisms. There is exploding knowledge in some of the genetic causes and influences on these disorders. Now we are able to target these genetic abnormalities in a growing number of ways. An absolute breakthrough drug was Imatinib for Chronic Myelogenon Leukemia where we knew what the abnormal chromosome was, what the gene product was and we could specifically target it with a pill you take once a day. People used to die in three or four years and now live forever. But we're starting to be able to do that for other Leukemias and Lymphomas which are more complicated because in CML there is consistent abnormality, and in these other disorders there are usually multiple abnormalities, and not everyone has the same ones. But we're learning to sort those out and to develop specific treatments that target specific gene abnormalities. Immuno-therapy is another huge emerging area. For decades people have wanted to harness the body's immune response against the cancer, but now we have new exciting leads that are spectacularly successful in preliminary studies and need to be expanded and made more practical.
My Dad: And this is where your own immune system is trained and restructured to attack?
Dr. Rice: One of the biggest recent breakthroughs is that we have learned that cancer is able to shut off the immune system and escape from it. And now, we are leaning how to reactivate it and prevent the cancer cells from shutting the immune system off, and that leads to the destruction of the cancer cells. I am certain there are going to be Nobel Prizes in the next year or two based on this; this is an expanding area of interest. We are doing some of this work here at Methodist and I am able to refer my patients to those studies. Antibody treatments is a slightly different way to go about things but has also greatly improved the outlook for many people.
Katie: Why is this research important?
Dr. Rice: [Leukemia and Lymphoma] are 5% of all cancers, and in young people it's a higher percentage. It's 5% of all cancers but the importance is way out of proportion to the 5%. A very high number of breakthroughs in cancer therapy came through studies and treatments of Lymphoma and Leukemia and these were later applied to other cancers successfully. The first wide spread cancers to be cured, the way to use chemotherapy, the way to use radio therapy in curative ways came through studies of Leukemia and Lymphoma...We are on the cusp of these new breakthrough therapies and the leader in all of these studies is Leukemia and Lymphoma.
Katie: The research affects everyone?
Dr. Rice: Everyone. Everyone.
The final question I asked Dr. Rice was, "For those of us who are not in the medical community, what can we do to help, to advance this research?" "You don't have to go to medical school to help" was his immediate answer. And then he thought about this one a while (even overnight and sending me an email the next day), and it turns out the simple answer was the best, we can donate money. We can raise awareness, and we can donate money. That is what we are doing with this campaign. You heard Dr. Rice here. The research is moving so quickly, and advances are being made all of the time. But they need our support in the way of funding to make it happen. In the email he sent me the day after our interview he also mentioned that he recently spoke at a symposium on Chronic Leukemia that LLS sponsored, and they have provided funding for his clinical fellowship trainees and the fellows' research. Dr. Rice noted that the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society is also supportive of many educational and patient support efforts, not just research. The money is being put into action but that would all end without our support.
This is a fun competition, sure. And turns out I am super competitive and want to win, of course. But here, in this interview, is the real reason I signed up for this campaign 6 months ago. Every dollar raised is a vote for me. And while in just over 2 weeks, those votes won't mean a darn thing, those dollars will mean a great deal. Have you ever voted in an election, but left feeling like your vote doesn't matter? I can assure you, that in this election, IT DOES!!! Vote here, vote for breakthroughs, vote for new treatments, vote for a CURE!
nice
ReplyDelete