Samuel Broder
Former Head of the National Cancer Institute (NCI)
Samuel Broder is the former head of the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the largest and most important Agency for cancer research in the world. President Ronald Reagan appointed Dr. Broder to serve as Director of the NCI in 1989, and he held the position for six years. While at the NCI, he also oversaw the development of numerous anti-cancer therapeutic agents, such as TAXOL®. As NCI Director, Dr. Broder helped launch a number of large-scale clinical trials related to the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of cancer, and he inaugurated the highly successful SPORE Program.
Dr. Broder joined the Celera Corporation at its founding in 1998, as the Executive Vice President for Medical Affairs and Chief Medical Officer, and helped advance the human genome project, the elucidation of the 3 billion letters of code that make up human DNA. His most recent position was as SVP, Health Sector, Intrexon Corp, with responsibilities for gene therapy and synthetic biology.
Dr. Broder spent his entire career in translational medicine, and his laboratory interests have included antiretroviral therapy, the relationship between immunodeficiency disorders and cancer, the human genome, and the proteomics of cancer cells. In the mid-1980s, in response to the AIDS pandemic, he focused his attention on HIV-1/AIDS. His laboratory played a major role in developing the first 3 agents approved by FDA specifically to treat the AIDS virus. These are the novel nucleosides Retrovir® (AZT), Videx® (ddI), and HIVID® (ddC).
Dr. Samuel Broder graduated from the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor in 1970. He did an internship and residency in Internal Medicine at Stanford University in Palo Alto, and then did subspeciality training in medical oncology at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda. He is the author or co-author of over 340 scientific publications, and is an inventor on many patents. He has received numerous scientific awards related to his research in cancer and AIDS. He was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences in 1993.
St. Jude/American Cancer Society
In honor of Sam Broder’s contributions and being named our Hero, we donated to St. Jude and the American Cancer Society.
The mission of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital is to advance cures, and means of prevention, for pediatric catastrophic diseases through research and treatment. Consistent with the vision of our founder Danny Thomas, no child is denied treatment based on race, religion or a family’s ability to pay.
The American Cancer Society is the leading cancer-fighting organization with a vision of ending cancer as we know it, for everyone. We are the only organization working to improve the lives of people with cancer and their families through advocacy, research, and patient support, to ensure everyone has an opportunity to prevent, detect, treat, and survive cancer.