This month, I searched for two individuals who worked or are working to improve healthcare for women.

Opening up clinical studies and clinical trials to men and women for illnesses that affect both genders have saved lives.

Doctors can better understand that men and women may present with very different symptoms when experiencing a cardiac event or other illness.

What are “women’s diseases as opposed to men’s diseases?” How can research for a specific subset of a cancer benefit all cancers and save more lives? These are some of the questions Dr Bernadine Healy and Dr. Aditya Bardia have addressed during their careers.

Bernadine Healy (1944-2011) was a cardiologist and the first woman to be named Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

She was born in New York City. Her parents emphasized the importance of a good education. Healy graduated at the top of her class in high school and received a full scholarship to Vasser College where she studied chemistry. She went on to Harvard Medical School where she also received a full scholarship. Healy was one of only ten women in her graduating class of 120. She completed her internship and residency in internal medicine and cardiology fellowship at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Johns Hopkins Hospital. After completing her post-doctorial training, she became the first woman to join its faculty in cardiology and later rose in the ranks to become a professor of medicine.

She headed the coronary care unit at Johns Hopkins Hospital for eight years. At the medical school, she was in charge of faculty development and served as assistant dean for post-doctoral programs.

While at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Healy also held leadership positions at the American Federation of Clinical Research, the American College of Cardiology, and the American Heart Association where she would later become volunteer president overseeing educating the public and the medical community about women’s heart health.

President Reagan appointed Dr. Healy deputy director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. President George H. W Bush selected Dr. Healy to be the Director of the NIH. While serving as director, she assembled a team of world renown researchers to head the Human Genome Project and elevated nursing research. She also mandated that any clinical trials funded by the NIH for diseases affecting both men and women must include members of both genders.

In 1991, she started the Women’s Health Initiative Studies which researched the effects of disease and finding strategies for preventing death and disability from diseases affecting women after menopause.

When Dr. Healy became the president of the American Heart Association (1988/89) one of her goals was to convince the public and the medical community that heart disease was also a woman’s disease not a “man’s disease in disguise.”

After being appointed president of the American Red Cross in 1999, Dr. Healy worked to improve the safety and availability of the American blood supply. She also worked to establish the Weapons of Mass Destruction response team and in 2001, she coordinated the organization’s response to the 911 terrorist attacks.

The non-profit group, Age of Autism, named her their 2008 Person of the Year for her public support of research to dispel the theory that vaccines caused autism.

Dr. Healy died in 2011, thirteen years after being diagnosed with brain cancer

Dr. Aditya Bardia is a board-certified medical oncologist, Attending Physician at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Associate Professor, Harvard Medical School, and the Director of Breast Cancer Research Program at MGH Boston, Massachusetts.

Dr. Bardia and his research team are working to reduce cancer deaths due to metastases.

The team is concentrating on the breast cancer subset triple negative breast cancer (TNBC). It is a particularly aggressive form of cancer that is not easily treated. Survival rates for TNBC have not improved over the last two decades.

Dr. Bardia and his team are researching the development of Antibody Drug Conjugates (ADCs), “a new class of medications composed of antibody linked to active therapeutic agents for selective delivery of cytotoxic drugs preferentially to cancer cells”. His team has led the clinical development of a novel ADC for patients with triple negative breast cancer. The novel ADC called sacituzumab govitecan is one of many ADCs in clinical development including other antigens such as HER2.

For different cancers there are currently “standards of care” which are established combinations of drugs, possible surgeries, and radiotherapies that have proven to be the most effective treatment of a particular cancer for the greatest number of people. It’s an effective baseline of care, but oncologists and researchers know “one size does not fit all” when it comes to cancer treatment.

There are currently no diagnostic tests in “real time” to help detect the presence of these markers that will help oncologists determine the most effective drug for each breast cancer subset on an individualized basis for each patient.

To help oncologists pinpoint the most effective treatment for their patients, Dr. Bardia and his team are combining the innovative cancer cell detection technology with Dr. Bardia’s “expertise in development of molecular assays using circulating tumor cells to develop a diagnostic test for ADCs and accelerate development of novel precision antibody-based therapies for patients with metastatic breast cancer.”

If he and his team are successful, this model could be applied to other settings. It could potentially be used to improve the clinical outcomes of patients with advanced solid tumors, who otherwise have a poor prognosis. Who knows how many types of cancers will ultimately benefit from this research? 

Sources for this article:

https://www.nfcr.org/team/aditya-bardia-m-d/

 Image of Dr. Bardia also taken from above website with no intention of copyright infringement