From bench to bedside
New chair Selwyn Vickers, M.D., intends to build on the distinguished research tradition of the University's Department of Surgery
Ask medical leaders what influenced their career paths, and you'll receive many different responses. In the case of Selwyn Vickers, M.D., who in August took over as chair of the University’s Department of Surgery, his guiding influence was a surgical procedure and the mentor who pioneered it.
We are one of the three or four great departments of surgery in the country. We've had leadership that has made us focus on developing novel ways of changing the lives of patients.
– Selwyn Vickers, M.D.
As a fellow and surgical resident at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in the 1990s, Vickers developed a keen interest in the work of surgeon John Cameron, M.D., who refined the Whipple procedure, an intricate operation to treat pancreatic cancer. Although Cameron's refinements succeeded in reducing the procedure's mortality rate from 25 percent to only 1 percent, pancreatic cancer has remained the nation's fourth-leading cause of cancer deaths, with a five-year survival rate of only 4 percent.
"It was apparent that if surgeons alone were involved in the treatment, we wouldn't cure this cancer," Vickers says. "Dr. Cameron had a commitment not only to clinical medicine but also to research. He influenced me to define myself in a broader sense—to work as a developer of interdisciplinary teams to help patients."
An interdisciplinary approach
Vickers came to Minnesota from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where he was chief of the gastrointestinal surgery section and the John H. Blue Chair of General Surgery. He was also a principal investigator for a $4.5 million Pancreatic Cancer Specialized Program of Research Excellence (SPORE) grant and will continue that research here. One of only three awarded nationwide, the grant provides funding for scientists and clinical investigators to work together to bring research advances to patients.
"Although research is a big part of my background," Vickers says, "I'm equally interested in people and patients. It's from that passion for patients that I gained my passion for research."
One of his first acts as surgery department chair was to recruit a new professor and vice chair for research, Ashok Saluja, Ph.D., previously professor of surgery, medicine, and cell biology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. And he appointed David Rothenberger, M.D., deputy chair of the department. Rothenberger, a longtime surgery department faculty member, is also coleader of the University's translational research program and associate director for clinical research and programs at the Cancer Center.